Who Invented The Internet?

The internet as opposed as many people think is not the result of the American or British intelligence, military or universities that worked on a network that grew to become what the internet is today.

For instance, back in 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners published the first ever website on a network and consequently resulted in the misconception that it was Tim Berners who invented the internet when the truth of the matter is that the seeds of the internet had already been sown back in the 60s.

Among some of the more prominent names apart from Sir Tim Berners include Leonard Kleinrock who was solely responsible for developing the mathematical theory behind packet switching networks between 1960 and 1962 whilst he was still in MIT. This solution was critical towards the advent of the internet as it involved distributing small pieces of information from source to destination which was critical towards the development of ARPANET.

Now, at the mention of ARPANET, the name Larry Roberts starts echoing due to the fact that it was Lawrence (Larry) Roberts who sired the internet as one piece which was built upon Kleinrock’s packet switching concept, ARPAnet was indeed a project that was sanctioned by the US Department of Defence that rallied on the idea of interconnecting computers around the country.

However, it was not until the end of 1969 when the first successful data packet was sent from a single computer at the University of California to another computer located 350 miles away in Stanford’s Research Institute. Now this was not sufficient to make the network efficient, at least not until Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn came up with TCP/IP or otherwise known as Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol technology.

This was developed in the mid-Seventies and its sole purpose was to handle communications that was transmitted via HHTP and FTP platforms and the TCP/IP ensured that the reliability of the data that is sent or received from one IP address to another IP address was intact. Then we have Raymond Tomlinson who was responsible for the idea of linking user names to a domain name via the @ symbol in order to engage in personal communications.

The first ever email was sent out by Good Ol’ Ray in 1971 which was a test message to himself which read QWERTYUIOP.” Following suit there was Paul Mockapetris and John Postel who came up with the idea of a Domain name system and the first ever domain name ever was symbolics.com which was registered in 85’.

This lead to the need of a ‘service provider’ for people who wanted to use the internet and this order was taken up by Barry Shein who became the first commercial ISP (Internet Service Provider) which was made available to the public for about £12 a month and in 1989 and when Tim Berners WWW was introduced just two years later, the internet as we know it today was born.

After that Marc Andersen and Eric Bina helped bring Mosaic, the first browser into the scene before going on towards creating Netscape and the rest as they say was history!

Picture: Ruben de Rijcke, CC licence