History of the Internet and its Disruptive Inventors
Long before the technology existed to actually build the internet, many scientists and thinkers had already anticipated the existence of worldwide networks of information, including Nikola Tesla, who toyed with the idea of a “world wireless system” in the early 1900s, followed by visionary thinkers like Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush who conceived of mechanized, searchable storage systems of books and media in the 1930s and 40s.
Despite the work of these early thinkers, the first practical schematics for the internet would not arrive until the early 1960s, when MIT’s J.C.R. Licklider popularized the idea of an “Intergalactic Network” of computers. Shortly thereafter, computer scientists developed the concept of “packet switching,” which was a method for effectively transmitting electronic data that would later become one of the major building blocks of the internet.
ARPANET
The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network.
On October 29, 1969, ARPANET delivered its first message: a node-to-node communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one the size of a small house.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling ARPANET system, allowing Stanford’s computer to receive the note’s first two letters only, “LO.”
Transmission Control and Internet Protocol
The technology continued to grow in the 1970s, after scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, a communications model that set standards for how data could be transmitted between multiple networks.
ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1st, 1983, and from there, researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web
The online world then took on a more recognizable form in 1990, when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. While it’s often confused with the internet itself, the web is actually just the most common means of accessing data online in the form of websites and hyperlinks.
The web helped popularize the Internet among the public and served as a crucial stepping stone in developing the vast trove of information that most of us now access on a daily basis, making the internet one of the most disruptive game-changers in the history of man.