The "invention" of the internet cannot be contributed to just one person. The answer to 'Who invented the internet?' is that contributions of many different people contributed to the development of the internet as we know it today.

Who invented the internet?

J. C. R. Licklider is creditied with thinking up the idea of an internet in 1962 as a way of potentially unifying humans from around the United States (and the world) through a universal network of computers. He called it the "Galactic Network."

Because Licklider's previous experience was not in actual computer programming, however, he had to recruit others in order to help create the Internet for ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Larry G. Roberts created the first functioning long-distance computer networks in 1965 and designed the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the seed from which the modern Internet grew, in 1966. He was the scientist to finally utilize the proposed method of packet switching first created by Leonard Kleinrock. The Internet still uses packet switching as its primary way of transferring data.

Who had the first computer hooked into the internet?

A computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, became the first computer to connect to the Internet. In time, three more computers would be connected to the Internet in 1969, leading to the start of the Internet of connected computers.

Who invented the TCP / IP protocol?

Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf worked to modify the original method of packet switching pioneered by Roberts and Kleinrock and eventually created what is now known as the TCP/IP protocols. It was at this point when ARPANET was finally changed to the more easily pronounced Internet.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) moves data on the modern Internet, and was introduced in 1972 and 1973. If any two people "invented the Internet," it was Kahn and Cerf - but they have publicly stated that "no one person or group of people" invented the Internet.

Who invented the spanning tree algorithm?

Radia Perlman invented the spanning tree algorithm in the 1980s. Her spanning tree algorithm allows efficient bridging between separate networks. Without a good bridging solution, large-scale networks like the Internet would be impractical.

What is the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet?

Whilte "the Internet" and "the World WIde Web" (WWW) are often used interchangeably in modern conversation, they aren't the same thing. The Internet is the worldwide network of interconnected computers, including both web servers and computers like the one on your desk that run web browser software. The World Wide Web is something you can do with this Internet. But it is not the only thing the Internet is capable of.

One big example is sending email. This is done on the Internet, but is not part of the World Wide Web, which is generally taken to mean the interconnected web of publicly viewable websites.

The term "World Wide Web" also refers to all of the other information sources that web browsers can access. These other sources include FTP sites (an older way of transferring files), UseNet newsgroups (once the most popular way to post messages to public forums on the Internet), and a few surviving Gopher sites.

An intranet, or connections between the computers in your office, is another use of the Internet, but is not part of the World Wide Web, because only the computers in your office are connected together, and only people in your office can share that information.

I thought Bill Gates invented the internet.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a company called Microsoft in 1976. After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest.

MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS,and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS, dubbing their partnership "Micro-soft" in November 1975.Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the tradename "Microsoft" was registered.

In 1980 IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates bought the rights to MS-DOS, invented by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for hardware similar to the PC,

Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) was a system that allowed average users to use a computer.

MS-DOX later developed into the Windows OS (operating system). When the Windows operating system was released, the computer became a common household item.

Microsoft was late to the internet market, but it was able to take over the browser market by giving away IE with Windows.

Didn't Steve Jobs invent the internet?

No, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak formed the Apple Computer company,(now Apple Inc.), and marketed one of the first personal computers.

Steven Wozniak had built a computer as a hobbyist for his own use in the mid 1970s. When Jobs saw it, he persuaded Wozniak to assist him and started a company to market the computer. Apple Computer Co. was founded as a partnership on April 1, 1976.

Though their initial plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, Jobs and Wozniak ended up creating a batch of completely assembled computers and thus entered the personal computer business. They assembled the first prototypes in Jobs' bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs' garage.

Their first computer was quite an engineering marvel within the context of 1975 computing. In simplicity of use it was years ahead of the Altair 8800, which was introduced earlier in 1975.

The Altair had no display and no true storage. It received commands via a series of switches (a single program would require thousands of toggles without an error), and its output was presented in the form of flashing lights. The Altair was great for hobbyists, for whom its assembly-required nature was actually considered a feature, but it was not suitable for the wider public.

Wozniak's computer, which he named Apple I, was a fully assembled and functional unit that contained a $20 microprocessor (M.O.S. 6502) on a single-circuit board with ROM. All that was needed was some RAM, a keyboard, and a monitor to make a fully functional microcomputer.

The Apple is not necessarily the first microcomputer to use monitors and cassette storage. There were several projects and experiments around the same time which could claim the first.

Wozniak, however, introduced many new features. He put high-resolution graphics in the Apple II. His computer could now display pictures instead of just letters. He said,"I threw in high-res. It was only two chips. I didn't know if people would use it".

By 1978, Steven Wozniak also designed an inexpensive floppy-disk drive controller. He and Randy Wigginton wrote a simple disk operating system and file system. Shepardson Microsystems was contracted to build a simple command line interface for the disk operating system.

In addition to designing the hardware, Wozniak wrote most of the software initially provided with the Apple. He wrote a programming language interpreter, a set of virtual 16-bit processor instructions known as SWEET 16, a Breakout game (which was also a reason to add sound to the computer), the code needed to control the disk drive, and more.

Together with Apple co-founder Steven Wozniak, Steve Jobs helped popularize the personal computer in the late '70s. In the early '80s, still at Apple, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven GUI.

After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company.

The NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was never able to break into the mainstream mainly owing to its high cost. Among those who could afford it, however, the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system.

Steve Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port).

The NeXT Cube was described by Jobs as an "interpersonal" computer, which he believed was the next step after "personal" computing. That is, if computers could allow people to communicate and collaborate together in an easy way, it would solve a lot of the problems that "personal" computing had come up against.

During a time when e-mail for most people was plain text, Jobs loved to demo the NeXT's e-mail system, NeXTMail, as an example of his "interpersonal" philosophy. NeXTMail was one of the first to support universally visible, clickable embedded graphics and audio within e-mail.

NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel. NeXT technology played a large role in catalyzing three unrelated events:

The World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee developed the original World Wide Web system at CERN on a NeXT workstation.

Jean-Marie Hullot's 'SOS Interface' became the basic for Interface Builder which Hullot built for NeXT and which Berners-Lee also used in his project the program 'WorldWideWeb'.

NeXT computers were used in the development of the computer game Doom.

Jobs' progressive stance on Unix and open source underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s but ultimately became an expandable solid foundation for an operating system. Apple would later acquire this software and under Jobs' leadership experience a renaissance.

Today, the Personal PC using the Windows OS, and the Mac PC using the Macintosh OS are the primary ways the average person connects to the Internet as we know it today.

One of Steven Wozniak's subsequent companies when on to bring the first universal TV remote control to market in 1987. But that's another story, one you can read for free, thanks to the invention of the internet.