Although we may take it for granted nowadays, its creation was something no one could have forseen. This is because computers during the 1950's were these bulky and very expensive machines that ordinary people would only see in Science-Fiction movies. The first person in recorded history who came up with the idea for a global networking system was Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider in the 1950s. Understanding why he came up with the concept requires a bit of historical context.
During this time period, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an indirect war. This conflict was known as the Cold War. Unlike other wars, however, this one was not fought solely on battlefields. The Cold War was also a battle of technological and scientific advancements. So when the Soviet Union launched the spacecraft Sputnik and became the first people in space, President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which had the goal of advancing technology for space exploration and computer science. While space exploration would soon fall under NASA, ARPA was tasked with advancing computer science.
The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was released and proved to be successful. ARPANET was a Wide Area Network linking many Universities and research centers, was first to use packet switching, and was the beginning of what we consider the Internet today. It would soon become quite popular with the creation of the first electronic-mail (E-mail) software in 1967. By the end of 1969, coincendently, the same year the Apollo-11 astronauts reached the surface of the Moon, the ARPANet was fully implemented. Three years later, ARPA demonstrated their network to the higher ups in Washington D.C. Soon more innovations were made to the network. Robert Khan and Vinton Cerf collaborated in creating the Internet Protocol Suite (Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol: TCP/IP) which allowed the different networks to interconnect and served as a universal ruleset, public networks like prodigy.com and America Online rose to prominence.
Tim Berners-Lee would go on to creating software that made accessing information on the internet easy, now known as the World Wide Web. Despite what the doubters claimed years earlier, ARPA managed to make a communication network which would grow into the most important invention of recent time.
He invented the World Wide Web in 1989, an Internet-based world wide information sharing hypermedia initiative. He write the first wev client and server in 1900. He specified URL, HTTP and HTML before they were refined after the spread of web technology.
He is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and founder of (WST). After the spread, people like Bill Gates, The Alphabet Company, Mark Zuckerberg and others with new platforms and E-Commerce, Wikipedia has made the internet grow bigger and bigger. Today, we cannot function as society without knowing about the internet or how to use it.
