82f9c228_dissolution_of_ARPANET

By 1984, the US military became concerned about the expansion of the ARPANET and its growing non-military applications (see the film War Games released in 1983!). They split the network into the ARPANET for academic research and the MILNET for non-civilian users where transmission was encrypted and protected.

Throughout the 1980s, the US National Science Foundation began promoting private networks that used the ARPANET as their backbone. (Private in the sense of not publicly-funded.)

Later, these became commercial and subscription-based. A plethora of …NETS grew up (NSFNET, USENET, CSNET, TELENET etc.), all based on #packet-switching, the ARPANET nodes as the backbone and TCP/IP host communication.

These networks, although accessible to the public through subscriptions, remained unwieldy and inconsistent to access until the Web.