Unlike technologies such as the phonograph or the safety pin, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States in the late 1960s as a military defense system in the Cold War. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another. Today, we use the internet for almost everything, and for many people it would be impossible to imagine life without it.
The Sputnik Scare
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. The satellite, known as Sputnik, did not do much: It relayed blips and bleeps from its radio transmitters as it circled the Earth. Still, to many Americans, the beach ball-sized Sputnik was proof of something alarming: While the U.S. economy was booming and its consumer technologies were advancing, the Soviets had been focusing on training scientists—and were positioned to win the Space Race, and possibly the Cold War, because of it.
Did you know? Nearly two-thirds of the world’s 8 billion people used the internet in 2023.
After Sputnik’s launch, many Americans began to think more seriously about science and technology. Schools added courses on subjects like chemistry, physics and calculus. Universities and corporations took government grants and invested them in scientific research and development. And the federal government itself formed new agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to develop space-age technologies such as rockets, weapons and computers.
The Birth of the ARPAnet
Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible.
In 1962, a scientist from ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider proposed a solution to this problem: a “intergalactic network” of computers that could talk to one another. Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system.
In 1965, Donald Davies, a scientist at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching.” Packet switching breaks data down into blocks, or packets, before sending it to its destination. That way, each packet can take its own route from place to place. Without packet switching, the government’s computer network—now known as the Arpanet—would have been just as vulnerable to enemy attacks as the phone system.
'LOGIN'
On October 29, 1969, Arpanet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a large room.) The message—“LOGIN”—was short and simple, but it crashed the fledgling Arpanet anyway: The Stanford computer only received the note’s first two letters.
The Network Grows
By the end of 1969, just four computers were connected to the Arpanet, but the network grew steadily during the 1970s.
In 1972, it added the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, and a year later it added networks at London’s University College and the Norwegian Seismic Array. As packet-switched computer networks multiplied, however, it became more difficult for them to integrate into a single worldwide “internet.”
By the mid-1970s, a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf had begun to solve this problem by developing a way for all of the computers on all of the world’s mini-networks to communicate with one another. He called his invention “Transmission Control Protocol,” or TCP. (Later, he added an additional protocol, known as “Internet Protocol.” The acronym we use to refer to these today is TCP/IP.) One writer describes Cerf’s protocol as “the ‘handshake’ that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space.”
The World Wide Web
Cerf’s protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network. Throughout the 1980s, researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another. However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer working at the CERN research center on the Swiss-French border named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of linked information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.
In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a sophisticated browser that they called Mosaic. (It later became Netscape.) Mosaic offered a user-friendly way to search the Web: It allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links.
That same year, Congress authorized the National Science Foundation to connect the country’s research- and education-focused internet services to commercial networks. As a result, companies of all kinds hurried to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs began to use the internet to sell goods directly to customers. By the 2000s, companies including Amazon and eBay emerged as dominant players in the online retail space.
In the first decade of the 2000s, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram emerged, changing the way people connected, created and shared content. By around 2015, more people accessed the internet from smartphones than from other kinds of computers. By the early 2020s, companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and others starting rolling out advanced artificial intelligence systems to the public.
