IT ALL STARTED as a by-product of the Communism-Democracy cold war era. It was Paul Baran, a member of the RAND US government agency, who thinked of a military network that might enable the US military maintain their communications after a nuclear attack. The first physical network was built on 1968 linking 4 hosts, and the first email program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN on 1972. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who started developing what was going to be the TCP/IP protocol, first used the term Internet (1974). Domain Name System (DNS) was created by the University of Wisconsin on 1983. It was 1994 when  the rapid growth of internet started. Read the details.