Before the advent of computer networks that were based upon some type of telecommunications system, communication between calculation machines and early computers was performed by human users by carrying instructions between them. Many of the social behaviors seen in today's Internet were demonstrably present in the 19th century and arguably in even earlier networks using visual signals.

• In September 1940, George Stibitz used a Teletype machine to send instructions for a problem set from his Model at Dartmouth College to his Complex Number Calculator in New York and received results back by the same means. Linking output systems like teletypewriters to computers was an interest at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) when, in 1962, J.C.R. Licklider was hired and developed a working group he called the "Intergalactic Computer Network", a precursor to the ARPANET.
• Early networks of communicating computers included the military radar system Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), started in the late 1950s.
• The commercial airline reservation system semi-automatic business research environment (SABRE) went online with two connected mainframes in 1960.
• In 1964, researchers at Dartmouth developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System for distributed users of large computer systems. The same year, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research group supported by General Electric and Bell Labs used a computer to route and manage telephone connections.
• Throughout the 1960s Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran and Donald Davies independently conceptualized and developed network systems which used packets that could be used in a network between computer systems.
• 1965 Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts created the first wide area network (WAN). This was an immediate precursor to the ARPANET, of which Roberts became program manager.
• The first widely used telephone switch that used true computer control was introduced by Western Electric in 1965.
• In 1969 the University of California at Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah were connected as the beginning of the ARPANET network using 50 kbit/s circuits.
• Commercial services using X.25 were deployed in 1972, and later used as an underlying infrastructure for expanding TCP/IP networks.

Today, computer networks are the core of modern communication. All modern aspects of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) are computer-controlled, and telephony increasingly runs over the Internet Protocol, although not necessarily the public Internet. The scope of communication has increased significantly in the past decade, and this boom in communications would not have been possible without the progressively advancing computer network. Computer networks, and the technologies needed to connect and communicate through and between them, continue to drive computer hardware, software, and peripherals industries. This expansion is mirrored by growth in the numbers and types of users of networks, from the researcher to the home user.

Interconnected collection of autonomous computers(unique identity) is known as computer network.