The Internet and the Web
Packet switching (Baran, Davies), ARPANET and the first link in 1969, email (1971), TCP/IP and the 1983 switch, DNS (1983), the NSFNET and commercialisation, Tim Berners-Lee and the Web at CERN, Mosaic and Netscape, the dot-com boom and bust, search and Google, Web 2.0, and the internet's arrival in Nigeria and Africa (SAT-3 cable, 2002).
A network of networks
The internet won over rival network designs largely because its protocols were open and simple at the core (the end-to-end principle), letting anyone build applications on top. Africa's international bandwidth was scarce and expensive until undersea cables arrived: SAT-3/WASC landed in 2002, then Main One (2010), Glo-1 and others, and more recently Google's Equiano (2022) and Meta's 2Africa.
Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (1999); Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (1999); Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996); for Africa, Internet Society and Telegeography reports; early Nigerian internet histories differ on exact dates.