Every day you click and tap devices, most likely using the internet to answer your questions, stay up to date on current events, and keep in touch with people in the world around you.
The internet and its modern form, however, has changed over the years and is relatively new. While today’s youth grew up with the internet, many people didn’t. So when was the internet created? And who invented it? We have the answers for you.
How old is Google?:History of the most famous search engine in the world
When was the internet invented?
The date of birth of the Internet is widely believed to be January 1, 1983, but the road to its creation began long before the necessary technology for the Internet existed.

The creation of the internet involved the work of many scientists and engineers, with many of the people who worked to create it having a vision for the internet long before the technology to create it was invented, according to History.com. Since the early 1900s inventor Nikola Tesla had thought of a “worldwide wireless system”. (Yes, the electric car company Tesla is named after him).
According to History.com, “the first practical schemes for the Internet would not arrive until the early 1960s”, when Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider came up with the idea of using computer networks to communicate. Prior to this, computers had been used extensively as mathematical devices to speed up calculations.
Soon after, computer scientists created a method of transmitting electronic data known as “packet switching.” This would become an important element for the Internet, according to History.com.
In the late 1960s, with the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, funded by the US Department of Defense, the “first working prototype of the Internet” I was born. With ARPANET multiple computers were able to communicate with each other on a single network.
ARPANET delivered its first message on October 29, 1969, from a computer located at the University of California at Los Angeles to another at Stanford. Each computer was the size of a small house, and a simple “LOGIN” message crashed the network. Stanford only received the first two letters, according to History.com.
Technology advanced in the 1970s with the work of two scientists, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, who developed a “communication model”, standardize the way data was transmitted across multiple networks. ARPANET adopted it on January 1, 1983, and the “modern” Internet was born.
Who owns Google?:The same company that owns Waze and YouTube
Who Invented the Internet?
The invention of the Internet cannot be attributed to just one person. Instead, according to History.com, it was the work of many engineers, programmers and scientists. While the modern internet was developed from the ARPANET adoption communication model developed by Kahn and Vinton, this is different from the World Wide Web.
What is the World Wide Web?
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, or WWW, which is what most people recognize today as the Internet and allows users to connect to other pages on the Internet via hypertextaccording to the Britannica
The World Wide Web is often used incorrectly to refer to the Internet, when in fact it is a common way to access information on the Internet through websites. According to History.com, the World Wide Web has helped make the Internet more popular.
When was Google created?
The Google search engine was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but the idea was born from the two creators in 1995 in a dormitory of the university of Stanford.
After originally calling it Backrub, the pair set out to create a search engine that could use “links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web”, according to Google.
Page and Brin later changed the name to Google, a “play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros” to reflect their mission or make information universally accessible.
Google caught the attention of investors in Silicon Valley, leading to the creation of Google Inc. in August 1998. Page and Brin then moved their offices to a garage, where the company is notoriously founded.
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