If you go on the Internet today, you may be of the rather common opinion that its origins are just like its current form: to entertain some people, pay a lot of people, and just generally catalog the collective knoweldge of the entire human species before we ultimately destroy ourselves in some horrifically embarrassing way. And while these are all great reasons for the Internet to continue onward until the end of time, they are actually not why the net was originally created. Okay, technically there was something of a connection between its original purpose and the third of the reasons we just went over. But it is a pretty obscure connection.
Consider that in the beginning, computers were unbelievably expensive. Unless you were a government, a university or a major corporation, you were absolutely out of luck when it came to buying a massive, expensive piece of hardware which in many cases took up several large rooms worth of space. The military originally constructed computers that were supposed to be linked together, so that they could send information from one to the next so that they could coordinate their attacks, and defeat enemies more efficiently.
And while the original plan of being a more effective military superpower has largely fallen by the wayside, there are still some traces of that mentality left in the net. For one thing, unless you are very skilled, you can always be tracked when you access a site. And you can find a multitude of different strategy games that will allow you to defeat numerous, completely vilified enemies that have no redeeming moral characteristics and can be slaughtered to your heart’s content. The Internet is all about beat downs.