The 1970s were packed with new developments in networking technology. The email was invented in the early 1970s, followed a few years later by Usenet Newsgroups and Multipleuser Dungeons. Interactivity among strangers was becoming easier to achieve.
By the 1980s, the TCP/IP suite was defined as the standard communications protocol for the ARPANet.
Surprisingly, despite these seemingly rapid developments, only 5000 computers were part of this Net in
1986. Over the next few years, however, the establishment of five more supercomputer centers and the upgrading of the Internet backbone to a much higher speed of 1.544 Mbps (T-1) led to a quadrupling in the number of host computers. By 1989, there were 100000 computers on the ARPANet. Around this time, the Net was being used by two separate groups; the military and the commercial sector.