The personal computer was a fabulously functional device, but it was used primarily for office-related applications. For more than a decade, there really was no entertainment usage, other than CD-ROM-based video games, for the PC, which limited its penetration into the home. That all changed in the mid-1990s with the seemingly overnight birth of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web is actually just one part of the worldwide Internet. The Internet was developed in 1969 by ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), founded by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1957 in the wake of the Russians launching Sputnik and charged with advanced technology research. The idea was to provide a decentralized communications network that would not be disrupted by potential global war. Any individual node of the network could be knocked out, but these nodes could be bypassed and the network would survive. Academia became the largest user of the Net, with researchers linking up their computers to share data.

Developed in parallel to the Internet in the mid-1970s were time-share computer networks, companies that leased their massive computers, used primarily during the business day but which lay virtually unused at night and on weekends, to smaller companies who could not afford the expensive equipment.

In 1979, one such time-share computer company in Columbus, Ohio, called CompuServe started a time-share computer service available to consumers during evening down time. As home PCs became more prevalent, other online service companies such as Prodigy and America Online were formed to provide proprietary information and e-mail services to consumers.

Subscribers used a "modem", a telephone device that transmitted the digital code from the remote computers via telephone lines to a subscriber’s personal computer. These modems started as acoustic couplers – users actually placed their telephone hand-sets into a formed device connected to a phone line – and transmitted data at speeds of 300 bits per second (bps). Today's cable modems connect directly to the phone line and are capable of transmitting data at nearly two million times that speed.

These online services, however, were closed systems. Only subscribers paying an hourly fee could receive the services offered, although e-mail could be sent from any one service to any other via the Internet.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and a group of fellow researchers at CERN (Centre Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, created a hypertext computer code called hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), a text format code called hypertext markup language (HTML), and a universal resource identifier (later universal resource locator, or URL) for identifying document locations, that formed the basis for the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web is essentially a global online service available to anyone with the software to read the HTTP, HTML and URL data. This software was called a "browser". Berners-Lee's first browser was released in January 1992.

But consumers didn't become aware of the new World Wide Web until September 1993 with the release of a commercial browser called Mosaic, created by Marc Andreesen and others at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. The following year, Andreesen co-founded Netscape, whose browser became dominant until the release of Microsoft's Explorer a few years later.

Within a few years, proprietary online service providers such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy were offering access to the Web. But other local and national Internet service providers (ISPs) offered consumer’s access to the Web without the intervening proprietary services. By the late 1990s, faster "broadband" cable modems capable of conveying large data streams (as compared to limited "narrowband" phone lines) and the advent of digital subscriber lines (DSL) allowed cable and local phone service companies to offer direct access to the Web.

In the last few years, so-called third generation (3G) wireless broadband cellular networks such as Verizon's Ev-DO (Evolution Data Only) and the GSM EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment) networks, recently have brought the Web to a number of handheld devices such as cell phones and PDAs at speeds from 140 kilobits per second (kbps) all the way to 2 megabits per second (mbps).

Online service and the Web, however, could be accessed only on a PC. But soon manufacturers realized that any computerized device with a screen and some sort of telecommunications connection could access the Web, either wired or wireless, especially the home television set.