Ever wondered just Who invented The Internet? Read on to find out more…
Who invented the Internet?
The origins of what we now know as the Internet can be traced back to the 1950’s and the development of early electronic computers.
In the 1960’s the US government commissioned research with the aim of developing means of communication between local networks of computers. This early work in the US, along with similar work in the UK and France, led to the creation of new, pioneering networks. Those networks weren’t quite the Internet as we know it, but were precursors to its formation.
General consensus agrees that the modern Internet came into existence around the early to mid-1980’s. This was around the time of the standardisation of the Internet Protocol Service (TCP/IP). It also followed the development of early networks such as the ARPANET, the CSNET and later the NSFNET.
Indeed, it was the ARPANET which first demonstrated to the public the concepts that would later become the Internet. In 1969 the first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and their associates at the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California. Across this link, the first inter-network message was transmitted and received.
Who invented the Internet? – No longer just for Academics or Government bodies
The Internet up to this point had been an exclusively academic and government led development. Early commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
In 1990 the ARPANET was decommissioned and in 1995 its successor, the NSFNET was also decommissioned. The departure of the ARPANET took with it the last restrictions preventing the Internet being used for commercial purposes.
From that point onwards the Internet was commercialised and has since been opened up to commercial traffic and continued expansion globally.
Once the Internet had been invented and established, Internet protocols and communication layers were developed – the most famous and best known of these being the World Wide Web.
Once the Web was opened up both commercially and publicly, this gave birth to a whole new area of technologies develop – namely “Web Technologies”, which include things like HTML, CSS, php, VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks), and website builders such as Shopify.