Who created the Internet?
Most historical accounts say the Internet was created in 1969, when the first network of widely separated computers was set up by the Defense Department to aid in computer research. It was called the ARPANET, and it was created by scientists at Bolt Beranek & Newman, or BB&N, in Cambridge, Mass., and at Stanford University, based on concepts described earlier by Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists J.C.R. Licklider and Leonard Kleinrock (and a few others). Well, in a historical sense, that is a reasonable claim. But it’s also a bit like saying the Interstate Highway System was created by the first Native Americans who blazed some of the trails the highways would later follow. Some accounts suggest Robert Kahn of BB&N and Vinton Cerf of Stanford really laid the groundwork for the Internet explosion. The two computer scientists, who joined forces at the Advanced Research Programs Agency (the ARPA in ARPANET) spent most of the 1970s developing the transmission system for sendi
The USSR’s launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA, in February 1958 to regain a technological lead.[1][2] ARPA created the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) to further the research of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program, which had networked country-wide radar systems together for the first time. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the IPTO, and saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution.
As university students graduated, they brought their knowledge of the internet into the business world. In the early 1990’s, Internet Explorer and Netscape came on the scene. With HTML, companies could set up websites to promote their businesses. From here, the internet kept growing until it has become what it is today.
• Companies developed very basic and hard to use networks, showing an interest in a system for the masses. • Legislators funded studies which inspired others to make the system more pratical and available to the masses. • Individuals, institutions, and commercial interests made it happen. If you asked the question, “Who was most influential in developing the internet?”, I would have to give the prize to Tim Berners-Lee. His contribution in making the world wide web easy for everyone to use transformed it from something used by tens of thousands of “techie” users into hundreds of millions of web surfers. Thank you for visiting our “Who Created The Internet” page!
