Origin of the Internet: Who Invented the World Wide Web?

Although it has been more than 30 years since the internet and the world wide web came into existence, the story of their origin is still sought after and read by people with great interest and excitement. There are dedicated blogs, forums, and foundations that spread awareness among people on issues related to the web.

Internet – History, Origin, and Evolution

The ARPANET project in 1969 Source: TAdviser

People had the idea for the internet long before the technology to create it actually existed. In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla had an idea for a “world wireless system.” In the 1940s, Paul Otlet, the founder of the field of information sciences, wrote about a “Radiated Library” that would use telephone signals to connect TV watchers to encyclopedic knowledge. 

In the early 1960s technology finally began to catch up with some of these ideas. Shortly after MIT’s J.C.R. Licklider popularized the idea of an “Intergalactic Network” of computers, the concept of “packet switching” was developed. This is a method for effectively transmitting electronic data and it would become one of the major building blocks of the internet.

In 1966, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA), a division of the US Department of Defence, established the ARPANET, which built on Licklider’s ideas to create a workable prototype of the internet.

The ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network. The system sent its first node-to-node message on October 29, 1969, between a computer at UCLA and a computer at Stanford. The attempt to send a single word — LOGIN — was enough to crash the small network — the Stanford computer only received the letters LO.

In the years that followed, engineers Vinton Cerf (also known as ‘father of the internet’) and Robert Cahn developed a communication model that standardized data transmission through multiple networks, they called it the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP).

On January 1, 1983, TCP/IP became a part of the ARPANET and the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet began to take shape. 

Who Invented the World Wide Web?

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer science fellow at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) first developed an outline for a system that could easily carry out the information sharing process between different research institutions such as MIT, CERN, Stanford, etc. by connecting their individual systems together. The Web was originally conceived to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.