The early internet was a fairly boring place compared with the rich medium we now have in the 21st century. Without graphical browsers and only fairly rudimentary (and esoteric) commands, early adopters were able to do only certain academic tasks for a period of time. Starting from ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), it was designed to facilitate basic communication and file transfers by being one of the first packet-switching networks. Additionally, it was the first network to implement the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, which we now take for granted as it runs behind the scenes of all modern web applications.
Why is this significant? The early internet was designed for fundamental and simple purposes, but it has grown since then. As a Python developer, you already understand the power of the modern web, so a full history of the web isn't needed. Let's skip to the origins of what we now know as the frontend.
Enter Tim Berners-Lee in 1990: the invention of the World Wide Web. By building the first web browser himself and with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) creating the first website, the floodgates opened and the world was never the same. What started as academic tinkering has now become a global necessity, with millions of people around the globe relying on the web. It goes without saying that today, in the 21st century, we use the web and multiple forms of digital communication to go about our everyday lives.
One of the projects that Berners-Lee created was HTML—Hypertext Markup Language. As the backbone of a website, this basic markup language spawned significant growth and development in the computing community. It only took a few years (the year was 1993, to be precise) for Mosaic, the first iteration of what we now call a browser, to be released. It was developed by the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a vital part of the web's development.