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So, have you ever wondered who
actually invented the internet?

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Some people have become zillionaires
thanks to the internet.

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But all they did was invent clever
ways of using the internet.

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So the person who “invented the internet”
should be a gazillionaire

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equivalent to, say, God, shoudn't they?

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Who should get the credit, then?

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Was it a British geek in a Swiss
underground lab?

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Maybe.

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Clever Americans threatened with
nuclear annihilation by the Russians?

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Nice idea.

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French scientists who decided to call
their computer network the “Le Internet”?

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Interesting.

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Or was it thanks to a myriad of smart
scientists working on something

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they knew was useful, but didn’t realize
would be so big?

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Well, let’s try and get some
facts straight.

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There’s the internet, a whole bunch of
computer networks connected to each other,

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and then there’s the World Wide Web, a
way of making it easier to share

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information using all those
interconnected computers.

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The internet as we know it today was at
least 40 years in the making.

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One popular but wrong story is that the
internet was developed by the USA

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so they had a communication network that
would survive a nuclear war.

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According to one of the founders of the
first network, the ARPANET, in the 1960s,

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this first network experiment wasn’t about
communication at all;

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it was about optimizing processor usage,
or time-sharing,

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which basically meant that scientists
could share computer power, too.

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That was because until the 1960s there was
basically no network—you had big machines

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called mainframes which sat in the room
and processed computing tasks

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one at a time.

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With time-sharing, these behemoths could
process several tasks at a time,

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which meant their power could be used by
several scientists at once.

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And, obviously, once you start connecting
computers together,

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you start to wonder about
what you need to do

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to make communications
between them easier.

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Scientists around the world were trying to
solve this problem.

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So let’s look at some other key concepts
that were developed elsewhere.

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Starting with packet switching.

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In Britain, there was a commercial
network, developed by the

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National Physical Laboratory, but which
never really got off the ground

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because it didn’t get funding.

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But they did come up with the idea of
packet switching, a way of avoiding

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congestion in busy networks by
cutting up data at one end and

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putting it back together at the other.

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The French also played a role.

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They were working on a scientific network
called CYCLADES,

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but they didn’t have a big budget, so they
decided to work on direct connections

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between computers, as opposed to working
with gateway computers.

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Now, as an aside here, this, admittedly,
isn’t very scientific,

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but according to one theory, a spin-off of
their research was the word “internet”.

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But you don’t have to believe it
if you don’t want to.

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So, now it’s the early 1970s.

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There’s quite a lot of computer
infrastructure, but communication

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is awkward and patchy, because different
networks can’t talk to each other.

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TCP/IP solves this problem.

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The TCP/IP protocols form the basic
communication language of the internet,

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which labels the packets of data
and makes sure that

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even though some pieces of the same data
take a different route,

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they all arrive at their destination and
can be reassembled.

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Networks really began communicating
with each other in 1975,

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so you could argue that was
the beginning of the internet.

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Email was also very important.

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It was developed for ARPANET in 1972.

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Most internet traffic in 1976 was email,
because academics thought

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electronic post-it notes were dead-core.

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With networks that could talk to each
other, communication was becoming easier.

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But all this communication was just text-
based, and it was pretty ugly to look at.

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In the 1980s, a Brit called
Timothy Berners-Lee

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spent time with CERN, the European
Organization for Nuclear Research,

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where physicists are trying to work out
what the universe is made of.

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He wanted to manage the scientists’
information and make it possible for them

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to share and interconnect
their work easily,

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making progress more likely.

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He did so by inventing an interface
using HTTP, HTML, and URLs

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that made internet browsers possible.

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He called his browser the World Wide Web.

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So he didn’t invent the internet,
but he did invent the Web.

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The first ever website, which he created,
was at CERN in France in August 1991.

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So, once the initial infrastructure
was in place,

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the key technologies had been invented,

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internet message boards
exploded in the 1980s,

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the phone companies saw the commercial
potential of digital communication,

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web browsers spread like wildfire in the
early 1990s,

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and ordinary people discovered email,

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then the internet expanded
rapidly and steadily

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and became workable for the masses
from about 1995.

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Hold on, didn’t US Vice President Al Gore
invent the internet?

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Ugh… no.

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And if you read what he said exactly,
you’ll know he never claimed to have done.

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But many people credit him with
energetically pushing legislation

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that encouraged the spread
of the internet.

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The internet exists because we
need to communicate,

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and most of us like doing it.

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That’s why humans have become
the dominant species on Earth.

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You could argue that the internet is
a natural evolutionary step

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and a manifestation of that need.

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It wasn’t invented by anyone
in particular,

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but when the building blocks were put
together by all those cool scientists

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from all over the place, the internet
became a communication tool,

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a retail tool, a research tool,
a propaganda tool, a spying tool,

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a shopping tool, a dating tool,
an entertainment tool,

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and a way of skiving off work while making
it look like you’re working or studying,

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which is what you may be doing now.

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Ultimately, though, you’re communicating,
especially if you leave a comment,

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and that might make you a
better human being.