Who invented the internet?

Well this answer has a long history. But the definite answer is to NEVER claim you invented the internet, nor hint in anyway you created it, if you know what I mean.

The widely accepted version is that its hard to pinpoint who or which group invented the internet.

History of the internet

The initial idea came from Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961, he discussed the idea of packet switching which is key in internet in his paper on “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets”. Packet Switching is the idea that data can be transferred in packets through different pathways in a network to reach a destination, where the receiving computer will decipher the data.

In 1962, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider had a vision of a world-wide computer network which is the internet we see today.

These ideas gave birth to the early version of the internet, the ARPANET. The ARPANET is short for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. The ARPANET was developed over the 1960s to support computers of different operating systems in a network. The initial members of the network were University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), The Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research CenterUniversity of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and The University of Utah's Computer Science Department. Interestingly the first message sent across was "lo". The intended message was login, but the system failed before it could send the full word.


Thereafter, a number of similar networks were developed around the world. There was a need for connect and unify these networks. To achieve this, a common language of transmission was developed, which we know as the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol). Credit for the development o protocols is mainly conferred to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf.

TCP/IP became the only approved protocol on the ARPANET, standardized, and over time the network of connected TCP/IP networks grew to become the internet. Internet became widely popular with the release of the Mosaic web browser in 1993.