By 1983, the ARPANET dropped NCP entirely and standardized on TCP/IP. Up to this point, you had to know someone's TCP/IP address (such 198.164.10.1) to send them mail. At this point there were about 562 host computers, so that was a lot of numbers to remember. To solve this, the University of Wisconsin created the Domain Name System (DNS). It allowed people to use easily remembered names (such as seagulltechnologies.com) and the DNS computer automatically translates the name into a TCP/IP number so that the request can be routed properly.
The ARPANET was divided into two networks in 1984: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET served the needs of the military and ARPANET went on to support the advanced research component of the Department of Defense.
An upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI and new circuits were built that were 25 times faster (T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps) than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM was chosen to supply the routers and Merit to manage the network. This new network was called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and the old 56K lines would remain called CSNET. The new T1 lines would be finished by 1988.
In 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF was created to serve as a way for technical coordination by DARPA, the US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway.
In 1987, BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN), another project of the National Science Foundation. There were 28,174 host computers on the networks.
After the T1 lines were completed traffic skyrocketed and in 1990 Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network & Services, which conducted research into high speed networking. The result was the T3, a 45 Mbps line. It only took a year before all the sites were connected to this new backbone. ARPANET was replaced by NSFNET and the old 50K lines were retired.
In 1991, CSNET was retired with its 56K lines.
In 1992, The World Wide Web (www) was released by CERN in Geneva. There were 1,136,000 host computers connected to the networks.
In 1993, Marc Andreessen and NCSA and the University of Illinois developed a graphical user interface for the www and called it 'Mosaic for X'.
In 1994, Hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the Internet. Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering to its web page and First Virtual, the first cyberbank opens.
The National Science Foundation announced that as of April 30, 1995 it would no longer allow people to hook up directly to their backbone. They contracted with four companies to sell access to groups, organizations, and companies. The initial annual fee for domains was $50. There were 6,642,000 host computers by the end of the year.
By 1996, most Internet traffic was carried by backbone networks of independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including MCI, AT&T, Sprint, UUnet, BBN planet, ANS, and more.
In 1998, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was formed as a non-profit regulatory body to take control away from the U.S. government, which relinquished it voluntarily. It oversees tasks relating to IP address and domain name assignment. All of the pieces were in place for a worldwide explosion of information and communication - both good and bad.