Who invented internet

As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers. Ray Tomlinson , an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today.

When DNS was introduced, this was extended to user host. Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends.

From the s onwards, the home computer industry grew exponentially. Computers were embedded with the rhetoric of the future and learning, but in most cases this meant learning to program so that people could actually make the technology do something, such as play games. Between and , the network grew from 2, hosts to 30, People were now using the internet to send messages to each other, read news and swap files.

However, advanced knowledge of computing was still needed to dial in to the system and use it effectively, and there was still no agreement on the way that documents on the network were formatted. The internet needed to be easier to use. An answer to the problem appeared in when a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his employer, CERN, the international particle-research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

The launch of the Mosaic browser in opened up the web to a new audience of non-academics, and people started to discover how easy it was to create their own HTML web pages. Consequently, the number of websites grew from in to over , at the start of By the internet and the World Wide Web were established phenomena: Netscape Navigator, which was the most popular browser at the time, had around 10 million global users.

The internet is the networking infrastructure that connects devices together, while the World Wide Web is a way of accessing information through the medium of the internet.

Berners-Lee also created a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. On 6 August the code to create more web pages and the software to view them was made freely available on the internet. Computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own websites. The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. Tim Berners-Lee was the first to create a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. However, this original application had limited use as it could only be used on advanced NeXT machines.

Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition. By , Navigator had around 10 million global users. The enormous excitement surrounding the internet led to a massive boom in new technology shares between and Investors in the stock market began to believe the hype and threw themselves into a frenzy of activity.

The internet was thought to be central to economic growth, while share prices implied that new online companies carried the seeds for expansion. This led in turn to a feverish level of investment and unrealistic expectations about rates of return. We are riding the early waves of a year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. How much weaker and more marginalized will they become as the rest of the world leaves them behind?

We were now talking in a small, non-descript conference room, but Berners-Lee nevertheless felt called to action. Talking about this milestone, he grabbed a notebook and pen and started scribbling, slashing lines and dots and arrows across the page. He was mapping out a social graph of the computing power of the world. When about a fifth of the page was covered with lines and dots and scribbles, Berners-Lee stopped.

To fill it up so all of humanity has total power on the Web. It was a few days before Mark Zuckerberg was set to testify before Congress. And in this obscure part of the Web, Berners-Lee was busy working on a plan to make that testimony moot. The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data.

How society on the Web could look different. For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Part of the draw is working with an icon.

For a computer scientist, coding with Berners-Lee is like playing guitar with Keith Richards. But more than just working with the inventor of the Web, these coders come because they want to join the cause. These are digital idealists, subversives, revolutionaries, and anyone else who wants to fight the centralization of the Web.

Popular sentiment also appears to facilitate his time frame. In Germany, one young coder built a decentralized version of Twitter called Mastodon. In France, another group created Peertube as a decentralized alternative to YouTube. And he fully recognizes that re-decentralizing the Web is going to be a lot harder than inventing it was in the first place.

In the first three months of , even as its C. For now, chastened by bad press and public outrage, tech behemoths and other corporations say they are willing to make changes to ensure privacy and protect their users.

Google recently rolled out new privacy features to Gmail which would allow users to control how their messages get forwarded, copied, downloaded, or printed.

And as revelations of spying, manipulation, and other abuses emerge, more governments are pushing for change. In the U. Nor do lawmakers—many badgered by corporate lobbyists—always choose to protect individual rights. In December, lobbyists for telecom companies pushed the Federal Communications Commission to roll back net-neutrality rules, which protect equal access to the Internet.

In January, the U. They had to change their form without changing their content. Think about water: it can be vapor, liquid or ice, but its chemical composition remains the same. This miraculous flexibility is a feature of the natural universe — which is lucky, because life depends on it. The flexibility that the internet depends on, by contrast, had to be engineered.

And on that day in August, it enabled packets that had only existed as radio signals in a wireless network to become electrical signals in the wired network of Arpanet. Remarkably, this transformation preserved the data perfectly. The packets remained completely intact. Powering this internetwork odyssey was the new protocol cooked up by Kahn and Cerf.

Two networks had become one. The internet worked. Tall and soft-spoken, he is relentlessly modest; seldom has someone had a better excuse for bragging and less of a desire to indulge in it. We are sitting in the living room of his Palo Alto home, four miles from Google, nine from Facebook, and at no point does he even partly take credit for creating the technology that made these extravagantly profitable corporations possible.

The internet was a group effort, Nielson insists. SRI was only one of many organizations working on it. Nielson himself had forgotten about it until a reporter reminded him 20 years later. By , Americans were having cybersex in AOL chatrooms and building hideous, seizure-inducing homepages on GeoCities. The internet had outgrown its military roots and gone mainstream, and people were becoming curious about its origins. So Nielson dug out a few old reports from his files, and started reflecting on how the internet began.

Forty years ago, the internet teleported thousands of words from the Bay Area to Boston over channels as dissimilar as radio waves and copper telephone lines.

Today it bridges far greater distances, over an even wider variety of media. It ferries data among billions of devices, conveying our tweets and Tinder swipes across multiple networks in milliseconds. The most important thing to understand about the origins of the internet, Nielson says, is that it came out of the military.

While Arpa had wide latitude, it still had to choose its projects with an eye toward developing technologies that might someday be useful for winning wars. The engineers who built the internet understood that, and tailored it accordingly. It maintains nearly bases in more than 70 countries around the world. It has hundreds of ships, thousands of warplanes, and tens of thousands of armored vehicles.

The reason the internet can work across any device, network, and medium — the reason a smartphone in Sao Paulo can stream a song from a server in Singapore — is because it needed to be as ubiquitous as the American security apparatus that financed its construction.

The internet would end up being useful to the US military, if not quite in the ways its architects intended. By binding different networks together so seamlessly, they made the internet feel like a single space. Strictly speaking, this is an illusion.