The Internet was designed in 1969 by the US Department of Defense to facilitate communications between the military sites scattered across the United States. 1989 - almost twelve million pieces of information were being sent across the Internet. 1991 - several groups decided that there was a need for tools to access the growing collection of information that was developing on the Internet. Students and other university community members could then access this data by using a simple menu structure to find answers to their questions.
Today there are thousands of gopher servers and millions of gopher users worldwide.
Internet users at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, decided to use a different approach to obtaining information from the Internet. This allowed the user to focus on what information they wanted and not on how to get to the location where the information resides. Mosaic provides a graphical interface into the hypertext world of the World Wide Web. Several of the developers of Mosaic left the NCSA to form their own company and created another graphical browser called Netscape.