Skip forward eighty years – post World War II scientists were rapidly progressing the field of computing. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA) was set up by the US military, a central agency for all military and defence research and development. Much of ARPA’s research was speculative and highly advanced for its time. Over in the UK, Donald Davies came up with the idea of dividing data into ‘packets’ so that information could be sent reliably between computers. Unbeknown to him, Paul Barran in the USA came up with the same idea at around the same time. Over at ARPA, Bob Taylor decided to overcome congestion on his scarce computing resources by setting up a network, making the first computer-to-computer data transfers in 1969. The ARPANET was born. By 1971 the first e-mail had been sent, and by 1973 , 75% of Internet traffic was e-mail.

Over at Xerox PARC, Bob Metcalfe and his team were developing a low cost networking system: the Ethernet, and the most commonly used local area network became commercially available in 1980.