As you might expect for a technology so expansive
and ever-changing, it is impossible to credit the
invention of the Internet to a single person. The
Internet was the work of dozens of pioneering
scientists, programmers and engineers who each
developed new features and technologies that eventually merged to become the “information
superhighway” we know today. Long before the technology existed to actually build
the Internet, many scientists had already anticipated
the existence of worldwide networks of information.
Nikola Tesla toyed with the idea of a “world wireless
system” in the early 1900s, and visionary thinkers
like Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush conceived of mechanized, searchable storage systems of books
and media in the 1930s and 1940s. Still, 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,” a
method for effectively transmitting electronic data
that would later become one of the major building
blocks of the Internet. 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. 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 1, 1983, and from there researchers began to assemble
the “network of networks” that became the
modern Internet. 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
step in developing the vast trove of information that
most of us now access on a daily basis.

My Papa

CERN
the European Organization for Nuclear Research.