Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 52
Vol. 1 No. 4 August 4, 1997 home / experts / internet

Who Else Helped?

Who Invented the Internet?

There is a large collection of technologies and protocols that are vital to the success of the Net. These include:

Ethernet: The overwhelmingly popular choice for local area networks today, Ethernet was conceived by Bob Metcalfe and described in his PhD thesis at Harvard in 1973. Today, Metcalfe uses his position as editor of Infoworld as a bully pulpit, for instance warning that routers can't keep up with the multimedia explosion on the Internet.

The Domain Name System: In the early days of the ARPANET, there were so few hosts, one merely needed a short list of addresses to connect to. As the number of hosts grew, things became more complicated. In the words of Jon Postel:

"Long ago and far away, there was an ARPANET, and it had a few hosts on it. People started keeping host names in a HOSTS.TXT file. At first it had about 20 names; then it had 200. When it got to have about 500 names, maintaining this file began to be a problem: because of the number of changes, it became an administrative load that was noticeable. So we went off and invented something called the Domain Name System. One major motivation was to divide the workload of maintaining this list of hosts, so there would be a higher-level structure of names that wouldn't change very often. The changes would take place down in the branches, and each of those would be fairly small, so the workload for any one person or any one site would also be small." (Quoted in The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Providers by Richard W. Wiggins, McGraw-Hill, 1995.)

Mosaic and the World Wide Web: Tim-Berners Lee conceived of the Web in the 1980s, and Marc Andreessen, then an undergraduate at Illinois, developed the first practical graphical browser for the Web, Mosaic, in 1992 and 1993.


Comments are welcome

Produced by Richard Wiggins and

Created: August 4, 1997
Revised: August 5, 1997

URL: http://webreference.com/outlook/column4/page3.html