Life without the internet cannot be imagined today but few among us know who invented it. The fact that the World Wide Web and the internet are different also leads to a lot of confusion and controversy.
Origins
The internet which basically means a network of computers was first discussed by Leonard Kleinrock in 1961. In his paper, he described a process called packet switching where data packets can travel from one place to another by carrying the address information in the data itself.
JCR Licklider described a world wide network called the Galactic network of computers in 1962.
The first working long distance computer networks were created by Larry G Roberts in 1965 who also designed something called The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in 1966, which was the prototype of the modern day Internet.
The Transmission Control Protocol which moves data on the Internet was invented by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in the early 1970s and they are often considered to be the real inventors of the Internet.
Later Developments
Further developments during the 1980s gave the Internet many new features which contributed to its final shaping. In the 1980s, Radia Perlman developed the spanning tree algorithm which allows for efficient bridging between different networks, a necessity for the practicality of large scale networks such as the Internet.
By the early 1980s, ARPANET started to resemble the Internet of today in many ways and TCP became the established standard. Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee are credited for the invention of the World Wide Web, the most popular application of the Internet. Limitations for commercial Internet traffic were removed in 1991and the Internet took off in a big way after 1995.
