Tim Berners-Lee is often cited as the inventor of the Internet. Is that even true? We look at history.
Computer networks already existed in the 1950s, although they were limited to their locations. The researchers were interested in the idea of allowing these networks to communicate with each other regardless of location. The first message was sent in 1969, but it wasn’t until twenty years later that a major development made the Internet accessible to the masses.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in the USA in 1958 and, among other things, worked on the possibility of allowing computers from different networks to communicate with one another. In October 1969 the time had finally come and UCLA sent the first message to Stanford via the so-called Arpanet. The message only contained two letters (LO) because the transmission stopped before the entire word LOGIN could be transmitted.
Starting with four networked computers, Arpanet expanded over the next few years. Universities in particular were very interested in becoming part of Arpanet. Therefore, the early days of the Internet were mostly related to science. However, with the increasing spread, new problems arose, for example due to the integration of the individual systems into a larger whole. It was only through the protocols developed by Vinton Cerf that an international network could be built. We still know the TCP/IP protocols today.
This further development of Arpanet into the World Wide Web took place at CERN (European Nuclear Research Facility) in Switzerland. Tim Berners-Lee worked there. In 1989 he developed a new level of the Internet with the World Wide Web. Instead of just transmitting information from one system to another, as was previously the case, the World Wide Web now made it possible to access a network that provides information and makes it available.
The World Wide Web was made available to the public in the early 1990s and celebrated its 30th birthday in April 2023. This meant that everyone could now access the information that was available on the “WWW”. The number of users rose quickly, and more and more companies and private individuals connected to the Internet. The Internet filled up with more and more information, becoming an early version of what we see today when we go online.
The beginnings back then were far removed from what we can use today with ChatGPT and AI. Nevertheless, the basis of what we still use today was created back then. This can be seen both in the names that are still used (such as “www”) but also in the protocols used that were created back then.