When the Internet was launched a few years ago today, only one company, Microsoft Hotmail, provided Internet services.

There was actually a huge number of companies involved in the rise of the Internet. Microsoft was a relatively late player.

The Wikipedia article on Internet history seems to emphasize the role of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in the 1960s.

There were numerous concurrent efforts to communicate data. Since DARPA funded university research it tended to be more influential.

DARPA influenced the release of the TCP/IP stack which appeared in 1983.

The telephone companies of the world built much of the infrastructure for online communications.

Widespread public access to computer networks began in the 1980s with companies like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and ton of local Bulletin Board Services. These companies usually included email with their products.

The concept of linked documents followed a similar path. People had been indexing documents for centuries.

Tim Berners-Lee created a program called WorldWideWeb with interlinked documents in 1990.

Chrome, a browser developed by Google, has beaten Firefox and now competes with the world's most popular browser Explorer,

Browser history includes things like the text browser Lynx. Mosaic which became Netscape.

Microsoft managed to dominate the industry when they included Explorer with their operating system. Explorer added some proprietary extensions to its browser. This gave them the edge over Netscape, but eventually doomed the browser when standard committees created alternatives.

In 1998, Netscape began the Mozilla project to create standards based alternatives to Explorer. This led to the creation of FireFox.

The "standards" were designed to conflict with the layout scheme used by Explorer.

Eventually Microsoft abandoned Explorer and created a product called Edge.

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