Long ago, (1961) the internet was created for the purpose of transferring data between US military bases.  Soon after, different Colleges and Universities picked up on the internet and linked their libraries and other informational resources to each other.  The network was called ARPAnet.  However, the individual servers installed in each University and military base had unique characteristics that stunted its ability to communicate with other servers.  In 1974 (when hypertext was actually proposed), Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published a paper called "A Protocol for Packet Network Inter networking".  By 1982, the TCP/IP protocol was developed to unite all servers under a common method of data transfer.  The most successful data sub protocol within the TCP/IP protocol was Gopher, created in 1991 by Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota.  GOPHER didn't have hyper links or pictures though.  In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web - a network of linked computers that all use the common TCP/IP protocol and that all use HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), a subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).  The advantage of HTML over GOPHER was that it had the ability to show pictures and link text through text hyper links.

        In 1993, the first web browser -MOSAIC- was made by the NSCA (National Center for Super computing Applications) at the University of Illinois by Mark Andereessen and a group of his students.  This browser was given out free of charge.  By 1994, over two million users were on the newly created web using MOSAIC and its friendly e-mail interface.  Due to its success, improvements were made to this web browser and Mark Andereessen and his students went on to join with Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics to found Netscape Communications Corporation.  Later, in 1995, Microsoft introduced its version of MOSAIC/Netscape called Internet Explorer.  Also, on 11/10/94 (according to InterNIC registration files), they introduced the Microsoft Network internet service provider.  The other major ISP's were CompuServe (10/6/88), America Online (6/22/95), and Prodigy (7/16/92).  And so the browser and ISP wars began!  Netscape 1.0 was improved to Netscape 2.0 by 1995.  I.E. 1.0 was released around the same time as Netscape 2.0 (to the best of my memory).  By the time Netscape 3.0 came out (around 1996), I.E. jumped its version from 1.0 to 3.0 within a month or so.  And finally, after many trial versions of Netscape 4.0 (Released in 1997 and named - Communicator) were released, I.E. 4.0 was released.  I'm not going to get into the "browser wars" here since this is a discussion about internet telephones.

        As a review of the history of the internet, first there was text which didn't contain hyper links or pictures and was difficult to transfer from one server to another.  Then there was a standard internet protocol made for the transfer of data called TCP/IP.  Next came the introduction of a more friendly way to write and store the text called GOPHER.  Finally, HTML was created in which pictures and hyper links could be added to text to make it look more desirable to read and more friendly to view the files the user wants to.  HTML required the use of a web browser, so MOSAIC was created.  Shortly after, Netscape was created by the same group who developed MOSAIC.  Finally, I.E. evolved from the original browser and the wars began.