The Internet goes commercial

The Internet scene in the mid-1980s was dominated by discussions of acceptable-use policies, through which government and academic users sought to restrict Internet access to, well, government and academic users. Unacceptable uses of the Internet, such as porn and spam, hadn't been thought of yet; in those days, "unacceptable" meant commercial. Today, billions of dollars in transactions flow through the Net every month.

Fortunately, Computerworld never ran a story with the headline, "Al Gore Invents Internet." The real inventors wrote a seminal report for the National Research Council in 1988 titled "Towards a National Research Network," which spurred the development of interconnecting high-speed networks and encouraged IT vendors to build TCP/IP into their products. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper describing "a distributed hyper-text system," which would become the World Wide Web.

E-commerce became an obsession when the dot-com bubble started to inflate in 1997. Even after the bubble popped in 2000, however, corporate enthusiasm for the Internet hardly slowed. Today, some of the hottest ideas in computerdom -- Web services, VOIP, service-oriented architectures and utility computing -- are grounded in the Internet.

Monopoly musical chairs