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Who Invented the Internet
The Internet is an extension of a computer network originally formed in the United
States during the 1960s by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Working
under contract to the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPA initially connected computers
at the Stanford Research Institute in California, the University of California at
Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the
University of Utah. This original network, the very first computer network, was
called ARPANET (ARPA NETwork). Scientists built ARPANET with the intention of creating
a network that would still be able to function efficiently if part of the network
was damaged. This concept was important to military organizations, which were studying
ways to maintain a working communications network in the event of nuclear war.
As ARPANET grew in the 1970s, with more and more universities and institutions
connecting to it, users found it necessary to establish standards for the way that
data was transmitted over the network. To meet the needs of data transmission
standards, computer scientists developed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
and the Internet Protocol (IP). During the 1970s various government, scientific,
and academic groups developed their own networks. Examples include the Department
of Energy’s (DoE) Magnetic Fusion Energy Network (MFENet), the High Energy Physics
NETwork (HEPNET), and the National Science Foundation NETwork (NSFNET).
In 1989 English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee initially designed the WWW to aid communication between physicists who were
working in different parts of the world for the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics (CERN). As it grew, however, the WWW revolutionized the use of the Internet.
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