By Mike King
I have to get this off my chest; Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent the internet. I don’t know if it is overenthusiastic patriotism or just poor journalism, but this week the British media has been full of stories about how Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet 25 years ago.
Tim’s been on a media tour talking about the future of the Web and his belief that there needs to be a ‘Magna Carta’ type bill of rights to protect individual freedom and curtail government backed online snooping; all very laudable and interesting. His media tour has been timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of him inventing the internet, at least that’s what large sections of the British media would have you believe. But they are wrong.
For the record, the origins of the internet go back to the late 1960s (long before Berners-Lee’s involvement) and a US military funded research network called ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Networks) that was used to connect research teams at universities and research laboratories across the US. ARPAnet was the first network to use TCP/IP and one of the first to use packet switching, key concepts that define the modern-day internet.
What Tim Berners-Lee did was develop the first World Wide Web server in 1989, a development that enabled the internet to be used to access and link between websites. He played a lead role in defining HTML (the language behind the creation of web pages) and the technologies that enable the Web to operate (hyperlinks and the like). So, Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web, which runs on the internet but isn’t the internet itself. In fact, if the internet hadn’t already existed there would have been no need for the World Wide Web.
In simple terms, the internet is the network, the Web runs on it. I feel better now.
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