Question: Who Created the Internet Network?
Development of the technologies that became the Internet began decades ago. The development of the World Wide Web (WWW) portion of the Internet happened much later, although many people consider this synonymous with creating the Internet itself.
Answer: No single person or organization created the modern Internet, including Al Gore, Lyndon Johnson, or any other individual. Instead, multiple people developed the key technologies that later grew to become the Internet:
- Email - Long before the World Wide Web, email was the dominant communication method on the Internet. Ray Tomlinson developed in 1971 the first email system that worked over the early Internet.
- Ethernet - The physical communication technology underlying the Internet, Ethernet was created by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs in 1973.
- TCP/IP - In May, 1974, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) published a paper titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection." The paper's authors - Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn - described a protocol called TCP that incorporated both connection-oriented and datagram services. This protocol later became known as TCP/IP.
