The Invention of the Internet

BY HISTORY.COM

Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the Internet has
no single inventor. Instead, it has evolved over time. The Internet got its start
in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the
Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and
share data with one another. Today, we use the Internet for almost everything,
and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.

The Sputnik Scare

n October 4, 1957, the Soviet

Union launched the worlds
first manmade satellite into
orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik,
did not do much: It tumbled aimlessly
around in outer space, sending blips
and bleeps from its radio transmitters
as it circled the Earth. Still, to many
Americans, the beach-ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming:
While the brightest scientists and engineers in the United States had been designing bigger cars and better television
sets, it seemed, the Soviets had been

focusing on less frivolous thingsand

they were going to win the Cold War
because of it.
After Sputniks launch, many Americans began to think more seriously
about science and technology. Schools
added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Corporations
took government grants and invested
them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself
formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of
Defenses Advanced Research Projects

Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age

technologies such as rockets, weapons
and computers.

tination. That way, each packet can

take its own route from place to place.
Without packet switching, the governments computer networknow
known as the ARPAnetwould have
been just as vulnerable to enemy at-

tacks as the phone system.

The Birth of the ARPAnet

cientists and military experts were

especially concerned about what
might happen in the event of a
Soviet attack on the nations telephone
system. Just one missile, they feared,
could destroy the whole network of
lines and wires that made efficient
long-distance communication possible. In 1962, a scientist from M.I.T. and
ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed
a solution to this problem: a galactic
network of computers that could talk
to one another. Such a network would
enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the
telephone system.
In 1965, another M.I.T. scientist developed a way of sending information
from one computer to another that
he called packet switching. Packet
switching breaks data down into blocks,
or packets, before sending it to its des-

LOGIN

n 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first

message: a node-to-node communication from one computer
to another. (The first computer was
located in a research lab at UCLA and
the second was at Stanford; each one
was the size of a small house.) The
messageLOGINwas short and
simple, but it crashed the fledgling
ARPA network anyway: The Stanford
computer only received the notes first
two letters.

The Network Grows

y the end of 1969, just four

computers were connected
to the ARPAnet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s.
In 1971, it added the University of
Hawaiis ALOHAnet, and two years
later it added networks at Londons
University College and the Royal
Radar Establishment in Norway. As
packet-switched computer networks
multiplied, however, it became more
difficult for them to integrate into a
single worldwide Internet.
By the end of the 1970s, a computer
scientist named Vinton Cerf had
begun to solve this problem by devel-

oping a way for all of the computers

on all of the worlds mini-networks to
communicate with one another. He
called his invention Transmission
Control Protocol, or TCP. (Later, he
added an additional protocol, known
as Internet Protocol. The acronym
we use to refer to these today is TCP/
IP.) One writer describes Cerf s protocol as the handshake that introduces distant and different computers
to each other in a virtual space.

The World Wide Web

ers to see words and pictures on the

same page for the first time and to
navigate using scrollbars and clickable links. That same year, Congress
decided that the Web could be used
for commercial purposes. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried
to set up websites of their own, and
e-commerce entrepreneurs began to
use the Internet to sell goods directly
to customers. More recently, social
networking sites like Facebook have
become a popular way for people of
all ages to stay connected.

erf s protocol transformed the

Internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s,
Taken from http://www.history.com/
researchers and scientists used it to
topics/inventions/invention-of-thesend files and data from one cominternet
puter to another. However, in 1991
the Internet changed again. That year,
a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an Internet that was not simply a way to send
files from one place to another but
was itself a web of information that
anyone on the Internet could retrieve.
Berners-Lee created the Internet that
we know today.
Since then, the Internet has changed
in many ways. In 1992, a group of
students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called
Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.)
Mosaic offered a user-friendly way
to search the Web: It allowed us-

Tim Berners-Lee

Biography

graduate of Oxford University,

Tim Berners-Lee invented the
World Wide Web, an internetbased hypermedia initiative for global
information sharing while at CERN, the
European Particle Physics Laboratory,
in 1989. He wrote the first web client
and server in 1990. His specifications of
URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined
as Web technology spread.

which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its
full potential. He was a Director of the
Web Science Trust (WST) launched in
2009 to promote research and education in Web Science, the multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by
technology.
Tim is a Director of the World Wide
Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to
coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
He has promoted open government
data globally, is a member of the UKs
Transparency Board, and president of
Londons Open Data Institute.

In 2001 he became a Fellow of the

Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of
Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germanys
Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was
He is the 3Com Founders Professor of
knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and
Engineering in the School of Engineer- in 2007 he was awarded the Order of
ing with a joint appointment in the De- Merit. In 2009 he was elected a foreign
partment of Electrical Engineering and associate of the National Academy of
Computer Science at the Laboratory for Sciences. He is the author of Weaving
Computer Science and Artificial Intelthe Web.
ligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) where he On March 18 2013, Tim, along with
also heads the Decentralized InformaVinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Poution Group (DIG). He is also a Profeszin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded
sor in the Electronics and Computer
the Queen Elizabeth Prize for EngiScience Department at the University of neering for ground-breaking innovaSouthampton, UK.
tion in engineering that has been of
global benefit to humanity.
He is the Director of the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C), a Web stand- Taken from http://www.w3.org/People/
ards organization founded in 1994
Berners-Lee/