Who really invented the Internet?

Inside the remarkable story behind the revolutionary invention.

By Toby Saunders

2023-07-22 09:11:39

Who invented the Internet? As with many landmark inventions, it is often difficult to pinpoint just one creator.

Just as with the light bulb, the telephone, and the discovery of electricity, it would be amiss to not at least mention a number of scientists and inventors outside of the known name who played important roles in the Internet’s invention.

Throughout the years many different people can claim to have had a hand in the development of the Internet before it became the tool we know and love (and occasionally fear) today. Some significant names in the invention of the Internet include Tim Berners-Lee (see main image), Paul Baran, Lawrence Roberts, JCR Licklider, Leonard Kleinrock, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, and others.

Here’s everything you need to know about who invented the internet.

Who invented the Internet?

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, a key part of the Internet used today. He proposed the idea in March 1989, while working for CERN.

The World Wide Web was built on systems and coding such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that are still used to this day (URLs contain ‘www’ for a reason).

However, the World Wide Web is not the Internet itself but was instead developed as an information management system – joining together hypertext and the pre-existing earlier forms of the Internet and cross-network communication.

It was designed to act as a web of online information (hence the name), using a web-like string of hyperlinks made possible by the creation of the likes of HTML, HTTP, URLs, and web browsers. Berners-Lee certainly invented the web browser and created the world’s first website – info.cern.ch – on 20 December 1990, which was viewable at CERN.

The World Wide Web opened for public use in 1991, entering into general widespread use following 30 April 1993, when Berners-Lee’s invention entered the public domain and after his writing of the first version of HTML.

As Berners-Lee puts it, though, “most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multi-font text objects, had all been designed” before he “had to put them together.”

As Berners-Lee told us in 2021, he now considers his invention out of control.

“Ten years ago I would have said that humanity uses the web and if you look at humanity you’ll see good and bad stuff,” he said.

“However, at a certain point, around 2016 [circa the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal], I realised it’s all very well if people I know are honing their bookmarks to have reliable, scientifically-based information, but there are a lot of people I don’t know who have very different bookmarks.”

Below, we’ll go through the important steps and names in the development of the Internet which ultimately led to Tim Berners-Lee’s invention.

JCR Licklider

Licklider, a US psychologist and computer scientist, described his ‘Galactic Network’ concept in August 1962 in a series of memos. They detailed his vision for computers interconnected on a global level in which anyone can access data and programs from different sites.

While working for the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) he convinced successors of this concept to carry on his work.

Leonard Kleinrock

"Leonard
Leonard Kleinrock poses beside the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) in the lab where the first Internet message was sent, at the University of California Los Angeles. Photo credit: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Kleinrock, a US computer scientist, published a paper on his packet-switching theory in July 1961 and a book on the subject in 1964. His theory was that an online network could be created in which computers communicated through ‘packets’ of information, rather than through circuits.

This allowed two computers within MIT’s Lincoln Lab to communicate with one another for the first time in 1965.

Paul Baran

Baran, a polish-American engineer, proposed a communication network without a central command point, working with the US Air Force at RAND in the 1960s to develop a method of allowing network access points to communicate with one another without the need for a main one so that if one’s destroyed, they still have access to everything.

Lawrence Roberts

DARPA’s chief scientist worked with Paul Baran and Leonard Kleinrock’s ideas to create the distributed network.

He published his ideas on the ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency Network’, or ARPANET, in 1967, detailing his plans for the computer network. The first message between two ARPANET computers was sent from a UCLA research facility to one at Stanford University on 29 October 1969.

Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn

Cerf and Kahn developed the ‘Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol’ (TCP/IP), which allows computers to communicate with each other across different networks.

It went public in 1974 and is still used today. Many consider the day ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially shifted over to TCP/IP the birth date of the Internet, which happened on 1 January 1983.

This all means that by 1983 we already had cross-communications across different networks and the Domain Name System (DNS) was set up, giving us the likes of .com, .edu, .net, .org, and so on and so forth.

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