History of Internet

The purpose of the internet when first created in 1962 was to address the US Military's concern about survivability of their communications networks. As their first step they inter-connected computers in the Pentagon. J.C.R. Lickider was selected to be head of the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO). Later Lickider's sucessor Ivan Sutherland got Lawrence Roberts to start a project to make a network. This is when the United States Air Force recommended packet switching oposed to circuit switching for a better network robustness and survivability.

After much work, the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between Kleinrock's Network Measurement Center at the UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science and Douglas Engelbert's oN-Line System (NLS system) at SRI International in Melno Park California, on 29 October 1969. The third site on the ARPANET was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics centre at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the fourth was the University of Utah Graphics Department. In an early sign of future growth, there were already fifteen sites connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971.

However people also say the Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.

The internet today uses Transmition Control Protocol (TPC) and Internet Protocol (IP), these where researched and and engineerd by computer scientists Robert Eliot Kahn and Vinton Gray (also know as Vinton Cerf).