WHO REALLY INVENTED THE INTERNET

As we luxuriate in the capabilities and spin-off technologies of the Internet, it is important to look back and appreciate the origin of this life-changing innovation. Although the invention is fairly recent, it is somewhat puzzling that its origin is actually a matter of controversy. Even the US former Vice-President Al Gore claimed to have “taken the initiative to create the Internet.” Although Mr. Gore may have played some roles in fostering the creation of the Internet through the US federal government legislation, he was not personally responsible for creating the Internet.

In a highly controversial op-ed last year for The Wall Street Journal, L. Gordon Crovitz attributed the creation of the Internet to Xerox, the Copying Machine people. He suggested that the US government envisioned a World Wide Web as early as the 1940s and went on to develop the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). He however stated that ARPANET did not lead to the Internet that we have today.

Those in the know have no doubts as to the origin of the Internet. It is the US government. An article by Colin Wood in the 27 July 2012 issue of Government Technology magazine sheds some light on this issue. Preston Gralla, a tech expert and prolific writer, has no doubts. Neither does communications expert Annabel D. Dodd. Based on a Scientific American rebuttal (of Crovitz’s article) written by Michael Moyer, Wood wrote that “the government did invent the Internet and Crovitz doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about.” “Crovitz is confused about technology,” Moyer replied. “Just because Xerox invented Ethernet, doesn’t mean it also invented “the” Internet – it didn’t. Connecting several computers together isn’t the same thing as a worldwide computer network.”

“The most important part of what we now know of as the Internet is the TCP/IP protocol, which was invented by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn,” Moyer wrote. Cerf and Kahn developed TCP/IP while working on a government grant. (TCP/IP stands for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) suite. A protocol refers to a set of communication rules.)

Several other people have criticized Crovitz for his misunderstandings, including the author of “Dealers of Lightning,” a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz used as his main source of material. “While I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book,” Michael Hiltzik was quoted to have written, “it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANET, a government project.” Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox PARC who developed the logic for the Ethernet protocol also criticized Crovitz’s assertion that Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox created the Internet.

“The Internet did start with the ARPANET project and the federal government directly funded the creation of the Internet we know today,” Cerf has written. “And Xerox deserves credit for great work, including creation of the Ethernet protocol, the ALTO personal computer, the Xerox Network System and PARC Universal Packet.”

“Ultimately, it was the work of researchers around the world from dozens of organizations that created the Internet. After our initial paper was published, detailed design was conducted at Stanford during 1974 and implementation started in 1975 at Stanford, BBN and University College London. After that, a number of other institutions, notably MIT, SRI, ISI, UCLA, NDRE, engaged heavily in the work,” Cerf further pointed out.

 

The goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) component of the US Department of Defense (DoD) in starting the Internet in 1969 was to develop a network secure enough to withstand a nuclear attack. They based the Internet on packet switching, where packets share the same circuit. If one computer crashed in any situation, the data could be rerouted to other computers in the packet network.

In 1984, as more sites were added to ARPANET, the term “Internet” was coined and in 1987, the oversight of the Internet was transferred from the DoD to the US National Science Foundation, and subsequently to commercial organizations in 1995.

Also of interest is the World Wide Web, which was developed in 1991 (some say 1989) by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland. Before this invention, the Internet, with its command-line interface, was difficult to use. The graphics user interface (GUI) that came with the World Wide Web made using the Internet very user-friendly. It also provided links to other web sites, the links in the form of highlighted text and graphics. In addition, the World Wide Web provides Web addresses as text rather than numbers in the form of uniform resource locators (URLs).

The first browser, Mosaic, was created in 1993 by the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and at CERN. It was developed as a point-and-click way to access the World Wide Web. This opened up the Internet to users without computer skill. The name of the protocol used to link sites is the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). When a browser sees “http,” it knows that this is an address for linking to another site.

Of course, when it comes right down to it, the government by itself doesn’t really invent anything. It is smart people that do the inventing and the government just dishes out tax money to bring their ideas to fruition. However, the US government deserves some credit for constantly coming up with cutting-edge project ideas and providing the funds to do the research.

To recap, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, working on the US government project ARPANET, are credited with the original invention of the Internet.