In the beginning (I mean the 1960 and 1970's) networking evolved in some defense department projects like ARPANET and in corporate environments using proprietary protocols developed by IBM, DEC and other OEM's.

When in 1974 a couple of PhD researchers working on ARPANET at Stanford, Vint Cerf (as in "surf the net") and Bob Kahn got to thinking about TCP and IP, open protocols debuted. They invented the protocols and came up the idea of specialized gateway computers we now call routers. The NSF funded a few nodes and the packets began to fly. The Internet was officially born on 1/1/83 in San Diego, Chicago, Ithaca and Pittsburg. At first the Internet was used to send mail and do file transfers and something weird called gopher but its power remained hidden. Universities, the government and a few defense contractors saw the possibilities and bought in big in the 1980's. Commercial users had to wait until the 1990's. In the meantime commercial interests continued using private networks like CompuServe and AOL.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee then at CERN, invented a way to display content on pages that could be viewed on computers all around the lab (CERN is a BIG physics lab in Switzerland). He included links in the text to other documents, making it hyper-text. The guys at the lab loved it. Then he set about writing software that could display the HTML delivered to the computer via the Internet. He called it a browser. By 1990 he was ready and things really took off.  Enthusiasts gathered and the linked pages they created and shared became the World Wide Web. His product was so successful that the terms Internet and World Wide Web have been confused for years.

Sensing great power in the web, a few companies took off in decidedly different directions at once to create better browsers. Mozilla Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and about five others became locked in epic battle. The stakes were as high as the formation of Standard Oil. The Information Revolution was gathering steam. Viruses mutated moving from the boot sector of floppies to the Internet and software virus defense became as indispensable as a polio vaccine.

Standards were forged and extended. The W3C convened to keep the standards standard. Early adopters among business and the public began using the web for fun and profit. Al Gore jumped in here and helped make US federal money available to build a great big telecommunications backbone network  MP3's became a popular way to share music files and Napster, Kazaa and other sharing schemes emerged to challenge traditional distribution and copyright laws. Porn and email were the most popular Internet applications. Spam became another nuisance of everyday life.

HTML was nice but offered no way to get data from databases and programs outside the browser. A common gateway interface (CGI) was developed and things took off again. The epic battle of the browsers expanded to include scripting systems that improved on CGI and offered ways to build web applications. Microsoft ASP, Open Source PHP, UNIX Perl, Java and about twenty other systems emerged as the successors to custom CGI applications.

All of these things were good. Consumers flocked to the Internet and shopping blossomed. Identity theft emerged as a techno-scourge. Chat expanded from text to voice and flirted with video. Companies like Vonage and Skype were born to move telephony from dedicated copper to the Internet. Search engines spawned billionaires as Yahoo and Google went public. A few investors got too enthusiastic between 1999 and 2001. Wall Street corrected and progress moved on.

ASP.Net evolved from this savory stew. Microsoft saw the opportunity to win even more market share by harnessing its many software programming initiatives into a common direction. They wanted to win the Internet war, the browser wars, the language wars, the binaries wars and the database wars. The Dot Net initiative is their answer, ASP.Net is the Web application component of Dot Net and they are sticking to it. Open Source is their greatest competition.