10 Everyday Inventions That Exist Thanks To War

9. The Internet

duct tape
Channel 4

Few inventions define the modern world like the Internet. It delivers our news, facilitates our communications, enables our impulse purchases and provides our videos of idiots setting fire to themselves. Above all, it connects people to people, or at least computers to computers, which today is pretty much the same thing.

It was the United States Department of Defence that made the very first iterations of the Internet possible. In 1969 the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency of the DoD had gathered a cabal of forward-thinking nerds and successfully connected four computers in an adorably dinky network.

DARPA's intention was to enable instant, complex communications of the kind the military dearly wanted, and over the following decades they got it in the form of the embryonic 'net known as ARPANET. The ability to send email was revealed to the world in 1972.

The concept of the World Wide Web in 1989 heralded the Internet was we know it, and today thanks to the need for bits of the military to talk to one another you can drunkenly order a DVD box set of Desperate Housewives whenever you want.

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Ben Counter is a fantasy and science fiction writer, gaming enthusiast, wrestling fan and miniature painting guru. He was raised on Warhammer, Star Wars and 1980s cartoons that, in retrospect, were't that good. Whoever you are, he is nerdier than you.