As probably the most famous scientist ever, Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen farther than other men, it is only because I stood on the shoulders of giants." The internet is the product of research and technical development by a large number of people, public agencies and Big Government as well as private commercial interests and the research departments of numerous universities.
Before we answer the question as to who invented what, we should make an important distinction between the internet and the World Wide Web. It is a common misconception that they are one and the same, when in fact the World Wide Web is simply an application which runs on the Internet. The World Wide Web is a series of inter-linked WebPages which run on a linked backbone of computers, essentially a huge network of networked computers, and which are themselves known as the Internet. In addition to the World Wide Web, there is a lot of other data traffic and activity which is being carried over the Internet backbone, but the World Wide Web is the application almost everyone is aware of and uses.
Another question to answer is just what constitutes the internet? Are we talking about when computers were first linked together as a network or when people started using the internet to communicate with each other? We've already seen that the internet is a linked series of computers, so is it the infrastructure that constitutes "the internet" or was it the computer application protocols which allowed them to "talk" to one another?
The answer is that they all contributed to some degree so it is impossible to draw a line and say, "This was when the internet was first invented!", and even less possible to say one specific set of people did all the work. This said, some people do stand out so we'll take a look at them and their work in a little more detail.
Larry Roberts: ARPANET & DARPANET - Networked Computers
Larry Rogers achieved the first, functioning computer network established over long distances in 1965 and from his work, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was developed (DARPANET was created by simply placing Defense at the start of the title). Though there is some disagreement over the role of the Pentagon in developing the internet, but the DARPANET project had its origins in maintaining communications and operability of dispersed military installations. The concept was that given a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the Russians, the surviving defense infrastructure would still be capable of action and response. The DARPANET or ARPANET internet went live in 1969 and consisted of four Honeywell computers linked and communicating with each other across substantial distances.
Some say this is not the first time this occurred and point to the work done by various telecommunication companies and work outside the United States, notably in the UK. Nevertheless, DARPANET represented the first networking of networked computers as a working model and utilized the work of scientists who undeniably contributed to the development of the modern internet.
JCR Licklider - a "Galactic Network"
One common element you will see amongst the major figures in the development of the internet is that they developed "concepts" rather than actual code or hardware. Licklider's contribution was in 1962 with the concept of a "Galactic network" of linked computers which would encompass the world.
Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) - "Packet Switching"
Back in the 1960's, when you picked up a telephone you dialed a number and that number was passed through a set of circuits to get you to the right telephone you were calling - this used "circuit switching". With a series of interconnected computer networks, the issue was to send messages and data information without the need to physically alter a series of circuits, in effect one piece of information could be sent not just to one "telephone" but to many and vice versa.
This needed "packet switching" so bursts of data could be transmitted across this backbone of linked computers using the address information contained within them, and this was Kleinrock's 1961 contribution.
Bob Kahn & Vint Cerf: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
Transmission Control Protocol is responsible for moving data across the internet and was developed by Kahn and Cerf as part of a team based in California which was wrestling with the problem of different computers talking to one another while they used different operating systems. A lot of controversy rages over when the first successful implementation of TCP occurred, but it seems that 1975 is when a series of university networks were linked around the world and this year therefore lays claim to when it first occurred.
Tim Berners-Lee& Robert Cailliau: the World Wide Web
Berners-Lee and Cailliau worked at the European nuclear research facility, CERN and they promulgated the use of hypertext links to network individual pages stored on the internet together. This gave birth to the World Wide Web and Berners-Lee went on to create the first web browser, the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) and the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which is used to request and send web pages between the different web servers and web browsers.
