Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins

Who Invented the Internet?

By Richard Wiggins

very once in a while, you'll see a newspaper article that says, "The Internet, which dates back to the 1960s, is a global network of networks." A recent article in The New York Times quotes Vinton Cerf, who, the article claims, "co-designed the Internet in the late 1960s."

There's only one minor problem with this reporting. The Internet does not date back to the 1960s, nor was it designed in the 1960s. Research into the predecessor to the Internet, known as the ARPANET, began in the late sixties. In this column we'll review some of the important players and milestones that contributed to the Internet as we know it today.

How Many People Designed the Internet?

We think of Edison and Bell as solitary inventors. In fact Edison had a team of researchers helping him at his labs, and Bell's legendary utterance "Come here Watson I need you!" certainly implies he didn't work alone. As technology has advanced in the twentieth century, it's harder and harder to identify a sole inventor of a new technology. Who invented the television? The Saturn V rocket? The laser printer?

Some important recent breakthroughs are associated with one person or one facility -- e.g. the mouse/icon interface brings to mind Alan Kay and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center -- but in other cases credit goes to a group of people spread around the world. As we'll see, so it goes with Internet technologies.

The Internet consists of so many facets as to make it hard to identify all the designers. There are the data protocols, such as TCP/IP. There are local networking technologies, such as Ethernet. There's the domain name system, which lets us find Internet hosts. There are the applications protocols, from e-mail to file transfer to the Web. To tell the story completely, we'd probably have to identify a few dozen key people. Here we'll highlight just a few of the main contributors.