Was the invention of the internet a fluke?
In a way you’re right. The Internet was originally a special network for military/industrial/academic use, to allow people across the country to use a few big computers at military installations and college campuses, back when computers cost millions of dollars. It was designed for military purposes, to work around blockages and outages. For instance, if your data was going through Chicago and suddenly Chicago was hit by a nuclear weapon, the data would automatically reroute itself. When the military no longer needed the Internet, there was talk of simply shutting it down. A number of people in Congress had the idea to open it to the public. Al Gore gets a lot of static even today for saying he ‘invented’ the Internet. What he actually did was (along with others) come up with the idea of making it public, adding a little funding to get it going. He said he ‘took the initiative to create the Internet’, and that’s just what he did. But the Internet as we know it probably would not have b
The internet in it’s present form, like most other things is fairly improbable. James Maxwell, a single person born well over 100 years ago provided the theoretical basis for creating & transmitting electricity in a consistent, predictable fashion, no other scientists were working on the theoretical side of the physics of electricity in quite the same way. His single set of formulas laid the groundwork for electronics , energy production and distribution and most of what we would call a modern communication and information system. As far as the modern internet, yes, very likely there would have been some sort of information system for fast communication, whether it took the form of web-pages, flash animations and was as consumer/personally focused as is the current internet is an entirely different question. It could have simply been a disjoint set of systems, communications, research, movies etc, but the convergence of these systems was/is fairly inevitable , say after the 1970’s or s
