<P> In 1979, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, originated the idea of using Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line UUCP connection with nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Following public release of the software in 1980, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded . UUCPnet, as it would later be named, also created gateways and links between FidoNet and dial - up BBS hosts . UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, ability to use existing leased lines, X. 25 links or even ARPANET connections, and the lack of strict use policies compared to later networks like CSNET and Bitnet . All connects were local . By 1981 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in 1984 .--Sublink Network, operating since 1987 and officially founded in Italy in 1989, based its interconnectivity upon UUCP to redistribute mail and news groups messages throughout its Italian nodes (about 100 at the time) owned both by private individuals and small companies . Sublink Network represented possibly one of the first examples of the Internet technology becoming progress through popular diffusion . </P> <P> With so many different network methods, something was needed to unify them . Robert E. Kahn of DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vinton Cerf of Stanford University to work with him on the problem . By 1973, they had worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible . Cerf credits Hubert Zimmermann, Gerard LeLann and Louis Pouzin (designer of the CYCLADES network) with important work on this design . </P> <P> The specification of the resulting protocol, RFC 675--Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, Network Working Group, December 1974, contains the first attested use of the term internet, as a shorthand for internetworking; later RFCs repeat this use, so the word started out as an adjective rather than the noun it is today . </P> <P> With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join almost any networks together, no matter what their characteristics were, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem . DARPA agreed to fund development of prototype software, and after several years of work, the first demonstration of a gateway between the Packet Radio network in the SF Bay area and the ARPANET was conducted by the Stanford Research Institute . On November 22, 1977 a three network demonstration was conducted including the ARPANET, the SRI's Packet Radio Van on the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Packet Satellite network . </P>

When was internet used for the first time