Some people have become zillionaires thanks to the internet

But all they did was invent clever ways of using the Internet

so the person who invented the internet should be a gazillionaire equivalent to

say God, shouldn't they? But who should get the credit then?

Was it a British geek in a Swiss underground lab?

Clever Americans threatened with nuclear annihilation by the Russians

Nice idea. French scientists

who decided to call the computer network the Le Internet.

Interesting. Or was it thanks to a myriad of smart scientists

working on something they knew was useful but didn't realize would be so big.

Well let's try and get some facts straight

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

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

using all those interconnected computers. The Internet as we know it today

was at least forty years in the making. One popular but wrong story

is that the Internet was developed by the USA , so they had a communication network

that would survive a nuclear war. According to one of the founders of the

first network the, ARPANET, in the 1960s,

this first network experiment wasn't about communication at all.

It was about optimizing processor usage of time-sharing

which basically meant that scientists could share computer power, too

That was because until the nineteen sixties there was basically no network,

you had big machines called mainframes which sat in a room

and process computing tasks one at a time. With time-sharing

these behemoths could process several tasks at a time which meant that power could be

used by several scientists at once.

And obviously once you start connecting computers together,

you start to wonder about what you need to do to make communications between

them easier. Scientists around the world were trying to solve this problem。

so let's look at some of the other key concepts that were developed elsewhere.

starting with packet switching. In Britain, there was a commercial network

developed by the National Physical Laboratory

but which never really got off the ground because it didn't get funding

but they did come up with the idea of packet switching,

a way of avoiding congestion in busy networks by cutting up data at one end

and putting it back together at the other. The French

also played a role, they were working on a scientific network called CYCLADES

but they didn't have a big budget so they decided to work on

direct connections between computers as opposed to working with Gateway computer.

Now as an aside here this admittedly isn't very scientific

But according to one theory, a spin off of their research

was the word "Internet". But you don't have to believe it if you don't want to.

so now it's the early nineteen seventies

There's quite a lot of computer infrastructure but communication is

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

TCP IP solves this problem.

The TCP/IP protocols form the basic communication language of the Internet

which labels the packets of data and make sure that even though some pieces

of the same data take a different route,

they all arrive at their destination and can be reassembled.

Networks really began communicating with each other in 1975.

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

Email was also very important it was developed for ARPANET in 1972.

Most Internet traffic in 1976 was email

because academics thought electronic post-it notes were dead core.

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

But all this communication was just text based

and it was pretty ugly to look at. In the nineteen eighties

a brat called Timothy Berners-Lee spent time with CERN, the European

Organization for Nuclear Research

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

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

and interconnect their work easily making progress more likely.

He did so by inventing an interface using HTTP

HTML and URL's that made internet browsers possible.

He called his browser the World Wide Web, so he didn't invent the Internet

but he did invented the web.

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

So once the initial infrastructure was in place the key technologies have been invented,

Internet message boards exploded in the nineteen eighties. The phone company saw

the commercial potential of digital communication.

Web browser spread like wildfire in the early nineteen nineties

and ordinary people discovered email then the

internet expanded rapidly and steadily and became workable for the masses

from about nineteen ninety-five. Hold on,

didn't US Vice President Al Gore invent the internet?

No. And if you read what he said exactly

you know he never claimed to have done. But many people credit him with

energetically pushing legislation that encouraged the spread of the Internet.

The internet exists because we need to communicate

and most of us like doing it. That's why humans have become

dominant species on Earth. You could argue

the Internet is a natural evolutionary step

and a manifestation of that need.

It wasn't invented by anyone in particular but when the building blocks

were put together by all those cool scientists from all over the place,

the Internet became a communication tool, a retail tool

a research tool, a propaganda tool, the spying tool,

a shopping tool ,a dating tool and entertainment tool

And a way of skiving off work while making it look like you're working or studying

which is what you may be doing now. Ultimately though,

you're communicating especially if you leave a comment

and that might make you a better human being.