Who Invented the Internet?

The truth is, many people — including some of the folks over at CERN — were responsible for building the internet. First, there were the visionaries who imagined that computers would one day communicate with each other.

Early computers were isolated devices that lacked the ability to share data without a lot of physical effort on the part of computer users. If you wanted to port information from one machine to another, you had to carry boxes of punch cards or reels of magnetic tape.

Memex

But some people glimpsed a future in which computers could work together to create access to the world's information and provide massive amounts of processing capability. One such person was Vannevar Bush, who played a vital role in the Defense Research Committee during World War II.

In 1945, Bush wrote that, based on the experience of World War II, information would play a significantly larger role in all future conflicts. He also recognized that the amount of information we generate daily is enormous. How could anyone manage it?

Bush envisioned an automatic device that could manage information. It was essentially a computerized library. He named this theoretical engine memex.

Memex wasn't necessarily a computer network but more of a conceptual approach to solving the problem of data management. His ideas would inspire future computer scientists to find a way to build a real memex device.

Eventually, technological developments caught up to these visions of a massive digital library. What set development into motion was the U.S. Department of Defense's plan to create a wide area network, allowing different computers running various operating systems to share information.

The Intergalactic Network

J.C.R. Licklider picked up where Vannevar Bush left off. He, too, saw the need for a new approach to managing information. He estimated that sorting through information took up about 85 percent of the time he dedicated to completing tasks.

Licklider also understood the potential for computer networks. He envisioned a network composed of other networks that would create a computing system more powerful than any in existence. He called his idea of a massive network of computers the Intergalactic Network.

These visionaries provided the ideas that the next round of engineers and scientists would expand upon to build the first wide area network: ARPANET.

The first big steps in building the internet stemmed from a project called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) funded a project to build the technology that could support computer networks even if the computers connected to the network used different operating systems.

Before ARPANET, all computer networks were limited in size and homogenous, meaning all the machines connected to the network were identical.

The program manager for the ARPANET project was Larry Roberts, who was heavily involved in the system's design. An engineer named Mike Wingfield designed the interface that would allow a computer to link with an internet message processor (IMP), a device that allowed different computers to communicate across the same network.

Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol

Hardware wasn't the only obstacle. Computer scientists had to figure out a way to make different machines understand one another through a common set of rules called protocols.

Two of the most important protocols were the transmission control protocol (TCP) and internet protocol (IP). These sets of rules replaced an earlier set called the Network Control Protocol. They're what ultimately allowed the ARPANET computers to connect to other networks.

The two people responsible for developing these protocols were Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf.

Packet Switching Method

Three other people who contributed to the way the internet works were Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock. These mathematicians designed packet switching, which is how computers send information over the internet.

Rather than send data as a giant file, computers divide files up into packets. It's possible, though not likely, that each packet associated with a single file could take a different pathway through a network to reach its destination. Once there, the receiving computer reassembles the file based on information included with each packet.

Other notable contributors were Ray Tomlinson, who invented e-mail, and Abhay Bhushan, who developed the original specifications for file transfer protocol (FTP).

The Domain Name System

In 1983, Paul Mockapetris invented something that's key to the way we interface with the internet: the Domain Name System. Devices connected to the internet all have addresses that are a series of numerals.

But most people aren't very good at remembering long strings of numbers. Mockapetris developed a way to let people type in word-based addresses that computers could cross-reference with a database of numerical addresses.

As for the World Wide Web, that comes to us courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee. The Web is relatively young — Berners-Lee created it in 1990. But in that short time, it's become one of the most popular ways to interact with the internet — so much so that some people mistakenly believe the Web is the same thing as the internet.

In fact, the World Wide Web is just one way to access the communication network known as the internet. However, Tim Berners-Lee's invention of web pages found on websites hosted by web servers accessed via web browsers is what most of us associate with the internet today.

These are just a few of the individuals whose work blossomed into the creation of the internet. Without their contributions, we wouldn't have the global network of networks, one of the most remarkable inventions in human history.