The document discusses the history and origins of the Internet. It began in 1969 as the ARPANET project funded by the US Department of Defense to create a decentralized network connecting computers. ARPANET linked the first four nodes and used early networking protocols. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet became available for civilian and commercial use. Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1991 using HTTP and the first web browser. By 2000, the number of devices connecting to the Internet grew so large that the original IP addressing system neared exhaustion, though new techniques helped avoid that problem and allowed migration to the new IPv6 system.