who invented the internet? not Al Gore. not even the Darpa net now internet.

[ChaseKenyon]

Nope none of them.

predicted and described in minute detail.

detail more than capable of getting some top level engineers interested and then making it real.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN: THE TOR.COM BLOG SYMPOSIUM
Robert A. Heinlein’s technological prophecies
MITCH WAGNER
Robert A. Heinlein’s fiction excelled at predicting the effects of technology, how particular tools would change society and the lives of people who used them daily. He usually didn’t predict the details, but his predictions of what technologies would mean were often uncanny.
The most dramatic example of this kind of prediction is “Solution Unsatisfactory,” a story which Heinlein wrote in 1940, which predicted the Cold War before the U.S. was even in World War II, and before the Manhattan Project. In the story, the U.S. develops a nuclear weapon and, for a brief time, is the only nuclear power in the whole world. America knows that its enemies will get the weapon soon. That much actually happened in real life, five years later.
But the story of “Solution Unsatisfactory” takes a different turn than real-life events turned out. In “Solution Unsatisfactory,” the head of the nuclear weapons project overthrows the government of the U.S. and sets up a global, international dictatorship with monopoly control of the nuclear weapon. And that’s the unsatisfactory solution of the story—the narrator of the story, the head of the nuclear weapons project, and presumably Heinlein himself all hate this option, but see the only other alternative, a global nuclear war, to be worse.
Was Heinlein’s unsatisfactory solution a nightmare scenario which we blessedly avoided? Maybe. But instead, we got 40 years of Cold War, the U.S.S.R. dominating half the developed world, and the U.S. propping up nasty dictatorships in the other half. And just because the Cold War is over, the threat hasn’t gone away; nuclear weapons are still common, as are governments and organizations willing to use them.
Heinlein was writing about these issues before nuclear weapons had been invented. He got the effects of the technology right, but he got the technology itself wrong. The weapon he predicted wasn’t a bomb, it was radioactive dust. ( yep our real worse case nightmare for the future of the planet is not theexplosive nuvlear blast it is the convention blast but of a "Dirty Bomb".
Also in 1940, Heinlein published “The Roads Must Roll,” a story in which enormous conveyer belts replace railroads and highways as the dominant means of transportation in the U.S. Long, thin cities grow up along the sides of these roads, just as suburbs sprouted along superhighways a decade later.( I have been to LAX and they had the so called horizontal escalators. They were four tracks wide and each track increased speed from casual walk and then slow jog and then good run and then Olympic Sprint speed.ou started on the slow track and then stepped til you got on the fast one if ou had a ways to go to your terminal gate to get on board.) In the Heinlein story, restaurants sit on the roadway itself, and you eat while in motion. We don’t have that in real life, but we do have what seems to be the same exact Denny’s replicated every three miles on the highways of southern California.
“The Roads Must Roll” is a story about the technicians essential to operating the roads, the dominant transportation system in America, and how these technicians have the power to credibly threaten to shut down the American economy by going on strike. The story played out in real life in 1981, with the threatened strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Again, real life played out differently than it did in the Heinlein story; in real life, President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers.
The leader of the road technicians’ strike was the villain of the Heinlein story, I’m not drawing the same conclusion about the PATCO strike, just noting the parallel of a relatively small number of technicians in a key transportation industry able to threaten economic chaos by going on strike.
Heinlein also invented the internet. In his 1938 first novel, For Us The Living, unpublished during his lifetime, Heinlein predicts a nationwideinformation network, from which the hero is able to instantly access a newspaper article from the previous century, from the comfort of a friend’s home. Today, theNew York Times Archive is online, witharticles datingback to 1851.

[Uncle Duke]

Robert Heinlein, as wonderful as he was, did not invent the Internet.

Information was being transmitted to multiple recipients as early as the 1920's from news "wire services", and the handshake acknowledgements required were already in place at that time. It certainly was interesting that Heinlein was able to make the extrapolation to virtual public access to news as well as to the idea that previous items might be stored someplace and re-transmitted, but that doesn't mean that he "invented the Internet".

Those wire services used multiplexing equipment and leased lines - IBM demonstrated in 1943 their new gizmo, what we currently think of as a modem, which replaced that and only required a modem at each end.

The "Internet" is a network of networks, all joined by a shared communications protocol which provides fault tolerance, a robust name-space and relies heavily on packet-switching technologies. Those were developed in the 1960's and then were standardized with the acceptance of the TCP/IP standard in the 1970's. To a large extent it is independent of of restrictions on the physical items (you hardly ever see a modem anymore and I don't know that I've ever seen a multiplexer) which earlier "information sharing" methods required by definition.

So, yes, Heinlein had great vision. But, no, he didn't invent the Internet. If you really wanted to place a single individual in that spot, it would be Paul Baran or Leonard Kleinrock.

[Peerie Maa]

Or . . . .

The opening ceremony took British creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness as its theme, and the technological shifts these have generated. It looked at how the invention of iron smelting led to factories, cities and prosperity, and how Berners-Lee's creation of the web was just as far-reaching.Sir Tim Berners-Lee live-tweets during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, with a NeXT Cube by his sideThe British inventor now works with the UK government on open data, and previously on the data.gov.uk project to share public data.

[John B]

Neither of those names being the man that the Olympic committee just named to the world as ' the inventor of the internet' in its opening ceremony.
So whats the truth of that?


Cross post .

[Ian McColgin]

Vinton Cerf with some important contributions from a handful of others actually developed the internetwork protocol that allows for an internet rather than many competing networks. It was demonstrated in 1977. Berners-Lee's interesting and valuable contributions to the already existant internet came nearly a decade later.

[Uncle Duke]

Vinton Cerf was, indeed, important, particularly as the program manager at DARPA, and later as one of the founders of ICAAN.

Berners-Lee is credited as the father of the "World Wide Web", through his implementations of HTTP servers and clients. That certainly was the start of the tools which we commonly use to access content through the Internet, but it's not the Internet itself.

But....

Paul Baran is credited with the development of multi-node communication network theory and packet-switching technologies. That work was based in large part on the work of Leonard Kleinrock, who did a seminal paper in 1961 regarding distributed communications and a later one on heirarchical routing.

Without those technologies and methodologies we wouldn't have the Internet and you can draw a very direct line from Baran/Kleinrock to DARPA/Cerf and the Internet as we know it.

[Ian McColgin]

All true. The cool thing about the internet is the astonishing and global collaborations that made and keep enhancing what we can do.

[Bob Cleek]

If you had to give credit somewhere for the "invention" of the internet, in the beginning, as now, I'd have to say it was pornography.

Actually, nobody "invented" the internet. It simply evolved. It was around, practically speaking, for ages before it became "the internet." It was only when personal computers began to come into common use that there was the potential for enough of a "user mass" to go "critical" and from there it just exploded. Along the way, problems were solved as they were encountered by teams of technicians. Once home computers came along and that "platform" existed, Ray Charles could have seen where it was going to go.

I worked my way through college back in 1968 and 1969 as a sales rep for ITT World Communications. ITT, together with RCA and Western Union International, handled all international communications in and out of the US. There isn't really any thing now that is all that different than what we had back then, other than bandwidth. If there is anything that really did "create" the internet, it was timesharing. Once timesharing became viable, we could connect computers through all the then existing modem phone line infrastructure. We used Model 33 and 35 KSR and ASR or teletype terminals for remote connecting to mainframe computers such as IBM 360's through dial-up modems (you'd snap the phone handset into a holder and effect an audio link. The slow machines would give you maybe 15 character per second and, later, you could do a bit over 100 CPS. (Our good professional teletype opperators could easily exceed 100 WPM on a keyboard, so they'd start a few feet of tape, load and start sending it, and then go back to punching tape, easily keeping ahead of the 100 WPM automatic feed.) We'd rent the terminals to the useers and charge for line time. The computer owners charged for computer use time as well. That was no different than the internet now, only a whole lot slower. We didn't have photo capability, let alone streaming video, of course. You could program a "picture" made out of "pixels" from keyboard characters ("ASCII art") and send that, but they were somewhat crude and timely to transmit and print. Still, everybody had the Playmate of the Month on their wall, made up of letters and numbers, but you'd have to stand back a ways to recognize her! We used "facsimile" machines for photos and exact copies of printed material. These were metal drums that rotated and held think heat sensitive paper. A wire would brush against the paper and spark, causing a black dot and that would create the image. When the technology got to the point where a lot of data could be transmitted in a reasonable time, images "went digital" and the old "facsimile" machines were replaced with electrostatic printers (xerox machines.) The "internet" was never a surprise to anybody working in the communications business back then. It was just a matter of when the techies got around to making the stuff to do the job.

Sending this stuff between programming centers in downtown office buildings all over the country was really the beginning of the "internet." Even then, "porn" was the driving force behind the internet!

[ChaseKenyon]

Interesting Duke and gang. I never said that Heinlein "invented"the Internet. I said and showed the source that he was one of if not the first to envision (Predict) the future of an internet and the ability for virtually anyone to look up things from newspapers and more from 100 years ago (details).

I too was part of the evolution of
DARPA net. At Hamiliton Standard we were in the forefront of automating and computerizing the control of all the energy consumption. As dManager and Technical lead of the Facilities automation system I had 2 DEC PDP11 70s and several earlier PDPs running on RSX!! real time software. At that time we and the guys at Carngie Mellon were driving the adaptation of messaging on the DARPA. The original DARPA "handshaking and verificatiobn for re transmit if nescessary was not designed to accommodate real time systems where a set of data transmissions like the energy usage of the various gov labs in our buildings wold often be check pointed and held indefinitely in suspension for a higher priority task. We first started having succes with my 11/70 by going ourt on one of my dedicated hard wired phone lines and in on another one to the second PDP 11/70.


8:00PM to 7:00 AM dArpa Dungeons and Dragons games used "millions and millions of stars worth" of bandwidth hours compared to the simple transmittal of Playmate of the month. (1976 -1979)

[htom]

( ascii porn )

[ccmanuals]

My earliest experience with the internet was in 1992 doing html programming with JPL. What's your earliest experience?

[htom]

1980, 81 ... not sure if it was first usenet, bitnet, or arpanet. Before that, fidonet. Gopherspace was one of the early competitions for the world wide web, but has died?