At Swiss Intranet Summit in Zurich in November there was a discussion about who invented the word intranet, and when. In a presentation I was giving I had suggested that 2009 marked 20 years of intranets, as 1989 was the year that Lotus Notes was launched. Intranet was certainly in common use in mid-1994 when Netscape was set up by Jim Clark (Sun Microsystems) and Marc Andriessen, who was on the team that had developed the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). This was developed into the Netscape browser, and launched as an enterprise software package for what were termed intranet applications, which was later named SuiteSpot. Netscape also commercialised the LDAP protocol, which had been developed at the University of Michigan, the home of NCSA. Netscape revenues in 1995 were around $300M just from intranet licences, and this started to worry Microsoft, who then rushed out Internet Explorer 1.0 which ironically was also based on the work that NCSA had done on the original Mosaic browser.

Although Internet Explorer 1.0 integrated with Windows 95, few customers used it, preferring instead to use Netscape. IE 2.0 was Microsoft’s first cross-platform browser, available to both Macintosh and 32-bit Windows users and then in the summer of 1996, Microsoft released version 3.0, which triggered a mass exodus from Netscape’s browser to Internet Explorer, primarily because Netscape charged around $50 for its web browser, while Microsoft gave Internet Explorer away for free. And the rest, as they say, is history. 

So my best guess is that intranet probably dates back to 1993 but no one seems to have owned up to the first use of the term. The article on intranets in Wikipedia is also very vague on this issue.

In searching for the person who first defined intranet I also discovered that it is not at all certain who came up with the word Internet. In 1973 Cerf, Khan and Metcalfe were working on the development of a host-to-host protocol TCP, which they described as an internetworking protocol. At that time TCP was the acronym for Transmission Control Program, rather than Transmission Control Protocol. The program was documented in RFC675 Specification of Internet Transmission Control Protocol, dated December 1974.  

Martin White

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