The internet doesn’t have a single “birthday,” but the date most experts point to is January 1, 1983 , when the ARPANET and related networks switched to the TCP/IP standard and the modern internet effectively went live.

From there, the World Wide Web (websites and browsers) was proposed by Tim Berners‑Lee in 1989 and built in 1989–1990, which is why people sometimes confuse “the web” with “the internet.”