Why was the internet invented?
96680
It was invented for porn.
52492
I would say Tim Berners Lee, who basically invented the World Wide Web.  He also created the first web browser and currently directs the World Wide Web Consortium.
390278
I think the real milestone that changed the Internet was the world wide web.  Without it, Yahoo wouldn't exist.
1050406
I think that just the fact that you were able to ask that question and get so many varied answers from people that you didn't know before from all around the world shows that the internet has the great potential to be the greatest tool in the evolution of society and communication.  \n\nIt is the people that use this power for the dark side, and that potential is there in all cases, not just in use of the internet.
300852
Creation of the Internet\nMain article: History of the Internet \nThe USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the U.S. to create the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in February 1958 to regain a technological lead. DARPA created the Information Processing Technology Office to further the research of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment program, which had networked country-wide radar systems together for the first time. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the IPTO, and saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution. Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project to implement a network, and Roberts based the technology on the work of Paul Baran who had written an exhaustive study for the U.S. Air Force that recommended packet switching to make a network highly robust and survivable. After much work, the first node went live at UCLA on October 29, 1969 on what would be called the ARPANET, the "eve" network of today's Internet. In December of 1970, Charles A. Petrik contacted the U.S. Navy and suggested that a special communications network, that the Department of Defense had built for use in the possiblitity of a nuclear attack, could also be used during peace time. Petrik convinced the military to connect the computers of the U.S. National Laboratories for scientific research purposes, and to allow these labs to get data to other labs faster, and safer.\n\nThe first TCP/IP wide area network was operational by 1 January 1983 , when the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone that would later become the NSFNet. (This date is held by some to be technically that of the birth of the Internet.) It was then followed by the opening of the network to commercial interests in 1995. Important separate networks that offered gateways into, then later merged into the Internet include Usenet, Bitnet and the various commercial and educational X.25 networks such as Compuserve and JANET. The ability of TCP/IP to work over these pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth. Use of Internet as a phrase to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated around this time.\n\nThe network gained a public face in the 1990s. In August 1991 CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland publicized the new World Wide Web project, two years after Tim Berners-Lee had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few web pages at CERN (which was set up by international treaty and not bound by the laws of either France or Switzerland). In 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the Mosaic web browser version 1.0, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 the word "Internet" was common public currency, but it referred almost entirely to the World Wide Web.\n\nMeanwhile, over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks such as FidoNet have remained separate). This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.
134030
Because webspace and bandwidth have gotten so cheap, that the start up costs are very minimal. Since there is a large risk in any business, the internet is an attractive option because there is less to lose.\n\nOther things that appeal about the internet are the fact that it is international, and that it is used by a lot of people spanning lots of markets.
1052998
Berners-Lee Answers !\n\n- Did you invent the Internet?\nNo, no, no!\n\nWhen I was doing the WWW, most of the bits I needed were already done.\n\nVint Cerf and people he worked with had figured out the Internet Protocol, and also the Transmission Control Protocol.\n\nPaul Mockapetris and friends had figured out the Domain Name System.\n\nPeople had already used TCP/IP and DNS to make email, and other cool things. So I could email other people who maybe would like to help work on making the WWW.\n\nI didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one document to another had been thought about lots of people, including Vanevar Bush in 1945, and by Ted Nelson (who actually invented the word hypertext). Bush did it before computers really existed. Ted thought of a system but didn't use the internet. Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except that it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet. Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, and didn't link all the way across the world.\n\nI just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web.\n\n\n> http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids\n\n> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee\n\nGood luck!
562062
No one person invented the Internet as we know it today. However, certain major figures contributed major breakthroughs: \nLeonard Kleinrock was the first to publish a paper about the idea of packet switching, which is essential to the Internet. He did so in 1961. Packet switching is the idea that packets of data can be "routed" from one place to another based on address information carried in the data, much like the address on a letter. Packet switching replaces the older concept of "circuit switching," in which an actual electrical circuit is established all the way from the source to the destination. Circuit switching was the idea behind traditional telephone exchanges.
971507
Hi Sweetie,\n\nHere is a different perspective for you about the internet.\n\nFirst, I well remember the days before Personal Computers, and before the internet, and when cell phones were in their (very expensive) infancy.  Communications between people was more expensive, took longer, and was far less convenient.  It was much harder to get up to date information, esp. say, weather, movies, and reference data.  And I am just going back to 1990!  While personal computers were available, not a lot of people had them, they were a HUGE investment, and far fewer people had access to any of the (also expensive) online companies, which were a far cry from what we have online today.\n\nSecond, there are many people in the world who are isolated, whether it be by circumstances, geographical location, or by disability/illness.  The internet has opened up the world to these people in a way most of us never imagined!  A lot of such people can now be actively and productively employed via the internet, where before they were unable to work.\n\nThird, just about anything invented eventially gets a dark side to it as well as the bright side.  It's just part of the way the world (unfortunately), is.  No matter where you go or what you do there are hazards, but that doesn;'t keep most people from going to work, or school, or the local mall, and neither should it keep people from enjoying all the internet has to offer.\n\nBe informed, be cautious, be safe ... and HAVE FUN!!
813276
Realistically? The search for knowledge has led to, or had a significant contribution to, the development of microwaves, radar, radio, superconductivity, computers, refridgeration, digital cameras, the internet and much more. When the theories that underpin most of these inventions were first discovered and tested, many people asked the same question - how does this help me? And then 20 years later some clever engineer invents a little box that heats up food. So give it time - almost every invention know to man once started as someone saying "I wonder how this works?"
875015
God invented the internet, so the first site was www.bible.com.  If that doesn't work, try www.load_of_crap.com.  They're basically the same thing.
65985
See a brief timeline at \n\nhttp://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history2.shtml\n\nRead full history written by the people who made it possible.\n\nhttp://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml\n\n\n\n\nThe first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, 4 starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.\n\nLeonard Kleinrock at MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 and the first book on the subject in 1964. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking. The other key step was to make the computers talk together. To explore this, in 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Mass. to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line creating the first (however small) wide-area computer network ever built. The result of this experiment was the realization that the time-shared computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on the remote machine, but that the circuit switched telephone system was totally inadequate for the job. Kleinrock's conviction of the need for packet switching was confirmed.\n\nIn late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps. 5\n\nIn August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team at UCLA. 6\n\nDue to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All this came together in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS, an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Inf
169640
Blessing.  Certainly there are problems to solve, but those problems will be solved by further technology, not by banning what we already have.  \n\nIt would be possible to provide a long list of the benefits of technology in the modern world, but I will cite a single example:  modern communication technology allows me, a complete stranger, to answer your question.  We never had anything in the past like the information tool we have now in the internet.  No matter how good a library one had available, it would still take a lot of time and know-how to research every question.  Now, it's all here at your fingertips.\n\nAsk any modern physician how many of his patients would have been worse off ten years ago, let alone fifty.  Ask any research scientist what has happened in his field as a result of modern technology.  The world does not stand still, and we cannot make it do so.\n\nRemember, nothing is an unmixed blessing.  Certainly the internet brings its own problems, but so did the technology of the crossbow!
741354
The internet is an amazing piece of technology that allows you to communicate with people (strangers and friends alike) all around the world, which simply isn't possible and/or practical with telephones. In this sense, the internet builds bridges, which helps connect vast groups of people thay wouldn't otherwise communicate with each other.  Examples: myspace, chatrooms, online forums, yahoo answers\n\nHowever, the internet can also builds walls.  Sitting in front of a computer isolates you from local people.  You can lack real human contact, which is important for a fulfilling life.  Also, nowadays, people can do almost everything online: check grades, banking, grocery shopping & other kinds of shopping, etc.  The convenience of doing everything online prevents people from going out to a store or a bank and interacting with people face-to-face.\n\nTo conclude, the internet is both a curse and a blessing.  It can work for you or against you, and this depends on how you choose to use it.
1140871
But I thought you invented the internet. Shouldn't you know a little more about computers?
13805
Depends on your definition of when the Internet began, but Ray Tomlinson sent the first network e-mail.  Please check the linked source for the full story.
563672
The internet started off as a little speck of dust that exploded...or was that the big bang theory?