Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

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Who Invented the Internet?

The Internet, then, is a collection of technologies and ideas that sprang from a large group of contributors. Each new important technology rested on important prior developments. HTML, the language of the Web, rests upon many years of development of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language); the underlying concept of hypertext dates back to a seminal 1945 article by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic Monthly.

And as important an advance as Mosaic was, in a sense, it represented an inevitable development. Mosaic offered a graphical user interface (GUI) for the Web, bringing to the Internet user's desktop user interface elements that were already commonplace in the CD-ROM world. Just as the world was moving from DOS to Windows in 1993, the world would've eventually found a GUI for the Internet, with or without Andreessen.

Vint Cerf's current employer, MCI, likes to call him "the Father of the Internet." His role in the design of IP was vital, but the label probably gives too little credit to other important players. Without denying the importance of any one contibutor or any one milestone, we should keep all contributions in their proper historical context.

Listen to Tim-Berners Lee as he explains to me how the Web revolution rests on "an quieter, smaller Internet revolution." Video Audio