1. who invented the internet

In , Nokia released the Nokia Communicator, which was the first cell phone capable of connecting to the internet. The famous dotcom bubble occurred in By , most publicly traded dotcom companies went bankrupt. Meanwhile, a young American company by the name of Google experienced a meteoric rise. In , Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook. In , Apple launched its first iPhone, changing the way people use the internet forever.

The following year, Apple launched the App Store with applications. In , the number of internet users reached 2 billion. By , the number of internet users swelled to 3. It was all made possible by overcoming the apparent technical triviality of making two computers talk to each other, something that we owe not only to Cerf and Kahn but quite possibly hundreds of scientists. More than 50 years since the internet was invented, there are still billions of people who lack internet access — something that most people living in developed countries now take for granted.

In fact, the internet has become such an integral part of modern life that many scholars argue that internet access should be considered a basic human right , similarly to the global right to health and liberty. It remains to be seen whether the service can be made affordable enough to be of use to those most in need.

But the future of the internet might be so exciting that it literally exceeds the boundaries of our planet. For more, check out the interview we did with Vint Cerf last fall in Germany on the subject. By the internet and the World Wide Web were established phenomena: Netscape Navigator, which was the most popular browser at the time, had around 10 million global users. The internet is the networking infrastructure that connects devices together, while the World Wide Web is a way of accessing information through the medium of the internet.

Berners-Lee also created a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format. On 6 August the code to create more web pages and the software to view them was made freely available on the internet. Computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own websites. The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. Tim Berners-Lee was the first to create a piece of software that could present HTML documents in an easy-to-read format.

However, this original application had limited use as it could only be used on advanced NeXT machines. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images next to text, rather than in a separate window. They led the company to create Netscape Navigator, a widely used internet browser that at the time was faster and more sophisticated than any of the competition.

By , Navigator had around 10 million global users. The enormous excitement surrounding the internet led to a massive boom in new technology shares between and Investors in the stock market began to believe the hype and threw themselves into a frenzy of activity.

The internet was thought to be central to economic growth, while share prices implied that new online companies carried the seeds for expansion.

This led in turn to a feverish level of investment and unrealistic expectations about rates of return. We are riding the early waves of a year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. Venture capitalists flourished and many companies were founded on dubious business plans. The most notorious of these was the high fashion online retailer Boo.

However, despite their failure, such businesses helped cause a fundamental transformation and left an important legacy. Many investors lost money, but they also helped to finance the new system and lay the groundwork for future success in ecommerce. Read about the first experiments in digital image technology—which took place longer ago than you might think.

A festival celebrating videogames, with special guests, workshops and fun-packed activities for gamers of all ages. Javascript is disabled. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. In the parking lot is a Harley, a Maserati, and a horse. But 40 years ago this August, a small team of scientists set up a computer terminal at one of its picnic tables and conducted an extraordinary experiment. Over plastic cups of beer, they proved that a strange idea called the internet could work.

You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle. The internet is the opposite. The internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and email, but its essence is always elsewhere. This feature of the internet makes it seem extremely complex. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. The internet is fundamentally simple.

And that simplicity is the key to its success. The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. As a military venture, Arpa had a specifically military motivation for creating the internet: it offered a way to bring computing to the front lines. In , Arpa had built a computer network called Arpanet , which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country. Arpanet grew fast, and included nearly 60 nodes by the mids.

That might work for researchers, who could sit at a terminal in Cambridge or Menlo Park — but it did little for soldiers deployed deep in enemy territory. For Arpanet to be useful to forces in the field, it had to be accessible anywhere in the world.

Picture a jeep in the jungles of Zaire, or a B miles above North Vietnam. Then imagine these as nodes in a wireless network linked to another network of powerful computers thousands of miles away. This is the dream of a networked military using computing power to defeat the Soviet Union and its allies.

This is the dream that produced the internet. Making this dream a reality required doing two things. The first was building a wireless network that could relay packets of data among the widely dispersed cogs of the US military machine by radio or satellite.

The second was connecting those wireless networks to the wired network of Arpanet, so that multimillion-dollar mainframes could serve soldiers in combat.