Saman Khan

Mr. Beltramo

AP World History

Due Date: 4 February 2020

The Internet: The Breakthrough that Connected the World

As I was growing up, I was incredibly interested in the Internet. It was a huge part of my

life, and I have spent countless hours on it. As a young child, I never gave much thought to how

the Internet worked. However, near the beginning of the school year, as my teacher announced

that the theme was “Breaking Barriers”, he explained that the “barrier” didn’t have to be a

physical one. My mind immediately went to the Internet. The Internet, I reasoned, broke the

distance barrier of the world, and allowed communication and information to flow between

formerly separated people. Accordingly, I researched the founding fathers of the Internet, and

how the Internet was put together. I decided to research this because it was something that

wasn’t an obvious breaking of barriers and I wanted to learn about something that would be

challenging, but insightful.

I began my research by, first, locating the first mention of a worldwide network and

found this mentioned by Nikola Tesla and Marshal McLuhan. At this point, I began pinpointing

the original founding fathers of the Internet and researching their lives. I found out that the

original founding fathers, Robert E. Kahn and Vint Cerf, both worked at DARPA for a

considerable amount of time. From there, I worked around this fact to find out that both Kahn

and Cerf developed the ARPANET, the original form of the Internet. It was later that Sir Tim

Berners Lee was the one who made it into the “World-Wide Web”. Much of my conducted
research was through biographies and informative websites, however, near the end, I began using

interviews of the founding fathers to see what they think of the Internet today.

Since the Internet required many pictures and words to be presented properly, I decided

to use a website. Websites also reflect upon the Internet, showing how much ease has come from

this invention. I used the background of a lit-up and connected planet Earth to symbolize the

connection of the Internet, and a dark theme to match with the background picture.

My project reflects and relates to the topic of “Breaking Barriers” because it broke the

barrier of distance between strangers and opened a universe of information for everyone. Prior,

the only way for people to communicate was through telephones and mail. However, after, the

Internet was opened to the public, things like IM and emails made talking easier than ever. With

the creation of search engines, information was readily available to anyone to view, creating

more knowledgable people than before.