Who Invented the Internet?

The Internet is indispensable today. But only a few know who invented it. It has developed into the most important communication and information medium of our time. In this article, we are looking for traces.

The Internet - who invented it?

It wasn't the Swiss, but she also had her fingers in the game.

• What they know and use today as the World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. Today Tim Berners-Lee heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The British physicist used the mark-up language HTML for the development of the WWW.
• And this is where the Swiss come in again: HTML - the basis for the Internet - was developed by the European nuclear research center CERN, based in Geneva. Everyone is talking about CERN today because of its particle accelerator. It is hardly associated with the development of the basis for the Internet.
• There was a network before. The forerunner of the Internet is the "Arpanet" (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Back then, data was exchanged over telephone lines. The Aparten was a project of the American military, the use was therefore reserved for this.

The history of the Internet: In the beginning there was ...

• ... the TCP / IP communication protocol. Already in 1974 the two American computer scientists Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn developed the data transmission.
• The next step was packet-based data transmission. Five clever minds from the USA and Great Britain developed the principle. They also invented other useful things that we still use today: email and FTP.
• We owe the Internet as we know it not only to men, but also to a woman: Radia Perlman. If you call Tim Berners-Lee the father of the Internet, she is the mother. The American software developer and network technician contributed the "Spanning Tree Protocol" in the 1980s. This algorithm enables efficient bridging of separate networks. Large networks like the Internet would not be possible without the "Spanning Tree Protocol".

Interesting facts about the Internet

We use it all the time, but actually know very little about the Internet. Here are a few facts:

• The wireless internet uses radio waves, much like the television. The electromagnetic waves were detected by Heinrich Hertz in 1887.
• The Internet is not only incredibly large, it is infinite. In any case, this applies to the content. However, the number of possible users is almost infinite. A PC needs an IP address to access the Internet. One might think that the number of possible IP addresses is limited. It is: the protocol can assign 340 sextillion addresses. To clarify the number a little: This is a number with 37 zeros.
• If you compare the capacities of the Internet with those of the brain, we do poorly. The human brain has around 100 million MB available as information storage - the Internet 850, 000 times as much. The Internet is also faster than our brains - if the Internet connection plays along. We are far more environmentally friendly: instead of 377 billion watts like the Internet, the brain only needs 20 watts.
• Is the internet the "brain of the world"? The Internet can save significantly more. However, it cannot do what a person is capable of: creativity, empathy or even forgetting - the Internet cannot do anything with that.
• The Internet is constantly evolving, not just in terms of its size. New technologies such as HTTP2 are being developed and are advancing global networking. We have devoted a whole series of practical tips to the Internet.

In addition to the benefits, the Internet also has many dangers and disadvantages. It has contributed to the fact that privacy will soon be on the list of endangered species. However, the responsibility for this lies not only with the possibilities of the network, but also with the users themselves and their lax handling of personal information. This particularly affects social networks. The internet is not a legal space, but the legal situation is sometimes vague. Perhaps you are interested in our article, which deals with this topic. It provides 5 reasons why Facebook is actually illegal.