Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Supply, Production, Logistics, grade: 5,0 (sehr gut), University of Pécs (Faculty of Business and Economics), course: Marketing III, language: English, abstract: No innovation or invention in the last decades had a stronger impact on our daily live than the development of the World Wide Web (www, also called "Internet"). Personal computers appeared in offices at the beginning of the 1980es in greater quantities. However, each workstation could used only for its own or within limited networks (for instance within one division of a company). On the other hand, like so often, U.S. military researcher, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated in 1973 a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective of this research programme was to develop communication protocols that are essential for the communication between computers and that should allow transparent communication across multiple, linked packet networks. In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the internet. Later, the networks began becoming public and emerged. By the end of 1991, the Internet has grown to include about 5'000 networks in over three dozen countries, serving over 700'000 host computers used by over 4'000'000 people. But this was only starting the incredible growth of the web community. Growth rates in Internet access and use of more than 150 per cent per year are still possible ( i.e.: in 2003 the growth in using Internet was 123.8% in Hungary and 166.7% in Malta). So it is not a surprise, that in developed Western European countries about 50% of the whole population in surveys mention the use of the web. As the table in the appendix shows, the share of Internet user is going to align nearly the number of landline telephone extensions.