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Today, it is impossible to imagine life without the internet. But few people know who invented it. Yet it has become the most important communication and information medium of our time. In this article, we set out to find the answer.
The Internet – who invented it?
It wasn’t the Swiss who invented it, but they did have a hand in it.
- What we know and use today as the World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. Today, Tim Berners-Lee heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The British physicist used the markup language HTML to develop the WWW.
- And this is where the Swiss come into play again: HTML—the basis for the internet—was developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), based in Geneva. Today, CERN is on everyone’s lips because of its particle accelerator. It is hardly associated with the development of the basis for the internet.
- There was already a network before that. The precursor to the Internet was the “Arpanet” (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Back then, data was exchanged via telephone lines. Arpanet was a project of the US military, so its use was reserved for them.
The history of the Internet: In the beginning there was …
… the TCP/IP communication protocol. As early as 1974, two American computer scientists, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, developed the foundations for uniform data transmission.
In 1983, TCP/IP officially became the standard—the actual starting point for the Internet as we know it today.
- The next step was packet-based data transmission. Five clever minds from the US and the UK further developed the principle. They also invented other useful things that we still use today: email and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
- We owe the Internet as we know it not only to men, but also to one woman: Radia Perlman. If Tim Berners-Lee is considered the father of the Internet, she is its mother.
Interesting facts about the internet
We use it all the time, but actually know very little about the internet. Here are a few facts:
- Wireless Internet uses radio waves, similar to television. Electromagnetic waves were discovered by Heinrich Hertz in 1887.
- The Internet is not only unimaginably large, it is virtually infinite. A PC needs an IP address to access the Internet.
- The current protocol can assign 340 sextillion addresses – a number with 37 zeros.
- The human brain has about 100 million MB of information storage available – the Internet has 850,000 times that amount.
- Nevertheless, the Internet knows no creativity, empathy, or forgetting—qualities that are reserved for humans alone.
Development since the 1990s
The internet has developed rapidly since the 1990s. Static websites have become interactive platforms, and text has given way to entire worlds of images, videos, and streaming. New developments continue to shape the internet today:
- Broadband and fiber optics ensure fast data transmission.
- 5G enables real-time mobile Internet.
- The Internet of Things (IoT) connects devices, vehicles, and entire cities.
- Cloud services and artificial intelligence are changing the way we work and communicate.
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