Who really invented the internet: CERN or the US military or someone else?

The father of the world wide web is widely acknowledged as British network designer Tim Berners Lee.

https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web

The 'world wide web' designed by Tim Berners Lee (starting circa 1989) is NOT the Internet. The Internet is a lot more than just the familiar 'WWW' bit and had been in existance around 10 years (in one form or another) before Tim started his work.

The Internet and Transmission Control Protocols were initially developed in 1973 by American computer scientist Vinton Cerf as part of a project sponsored by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and directed by American engineer Robert Kahn. The Internet began as a computer network of ARPA (ARPAnet) that linked computer networks at several universities and research laboratories in the United States. The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

According to Vinton Cerf -- 'The DESIGN of Internet was done in 1973 and published in 1974. There ensued about 10 years of hard work, resulting in the roll out of Internet in 1983. Prior to that, a number of demonstrations were made of the technology - such as the first three-network interconnection demonstrated in November 1977 linking SATNET, PRNET and ARPANET in a path leading from Menlo Park, CA to University College London and back to USC/ISI in Marina del Rey, CA

https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml
https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/
ideafinder.com/history/inventions/story070.htm no longer exists

Arpanet the first military net started in 1969

It was created to make a communication network with no critical paths - so if you bomb/lose one network centre all other network traffic simply goes another way. And the messages do not go on predictable paths... This is why some emails take a mysteriously long time to arrive. A message sent from A to C will not always go via B, it could go via FTHJYTES!

iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/professional/new_media/History/arpanet.htm no longer exists

The actual invention of the internet was by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/lee.html
He devised the html stuff and the idea of networking documents without having to use the same base system on all the computers. He worked at CERN. The contribution of the US military was that they had a large number of computers that could be linked this way. Of course, what they didn't want was that this new tool should become available to everyone. If the invention of html had been in the USA, they might have slapped restrictions on it. As it was, a Brit working in Switzerland was right out of their territory and he wanted the thing to stay freely available. He deserves more recognition for his achievements.

A minor distinction but I think the Internet is a US Army invention and the World Wide Web was invented by Mr Berners-Lee. I think general use of the Web took off with the appearance of the first Web browsers in 1993.

Perhaps this will help...

President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the need for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik ... The organization united some of America's most brilliant people, who developed the United States' first successful satellite in 18 months. Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking and communications technology.

In 1962, Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head ARPA's research in improving the military's use of computer technology. Licklider was a visionary who sought to make the government's use of computers more interactive. To quickly expand technology, Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts from the private sector to universities and laid the foundations for what would become the ARPANET ...

Around Labor Day in 1969, BBN delivered an Interface Message Processor (IMP) to UCLA that was based on a Honeywell DDP 516, and when they turned it on, it just started running. It was hooked by 50 Kbps circuits to two other sites (SRI and UCSB) in the four-node network: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI...," Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

"Do you see the L?"
"Yes, we see the L," came the response.
"We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O."
"Yes, we see the O."
"Then we typed the G, and the system crashed"...

The point that I do want to dust off and raise again is that ARPA wouldn't have happened, if what used to be the Soviet Union hadn't shaken complacent U.S. awake with a tin can in the sky, Sputnik.

http://www.netvalley.com/intval1.html

Arguably, it was the US Intelligence Community in the 1980's. It was spawned from the DSN (Digital Subscriber Network) system of mutually redundant telephone nodes that would automatically re-route a call if a node went down.

To add to the replies, no one really created the internet: it is just a large group of servers (like Angelfire) that can be accessed by use of or through internet providers (explorer, comcast, AOL, etc.)

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.

The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. were added. By January 1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in. After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.

The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.

http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html

The US military created the internet as a means to send battlefield intelligence from the front lines to the pentagon. It wasn't until the late 80's/early 90's that the mega consumer potential was discovered.

The development of what we now call the Internet started in 1957.

The internet is based on many technologies developed for ARPANET in the 1960s and 1970s. The first ARPANET link was established between a computer at UCLA and another one at the Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969. By the end of 1971, there were fifteen computers on the network.

The internet was invented in the 1990-99 decade. Before the invention of the internet telegraph, telephone radio and postal mail were modes of communication.
The first applications of nodes connected as a (ring) network over long distance by phone lines were realized between the 1st of September 1969 and the 1st of October 1969. Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency) was realized by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). Although DARPA's work is classified in this case the concept of resource sharing made the Internet possible. Other sources report the first connection was between DARPA and UCLA (Universityof California, Los Angeles). The node at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) would have -logically- been connected as well. The SRI node provided management and logging capabilities which made it imperative.

Development of internet started in 1957 when Sputnik I (the first satellite) was launched by Soviet Union. Americans felt threat by this and thought that the Soviet Union could also do bomb attacks from the space. So they created Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) in 1958. It worked for the safety from space based missile attack. Then they made another satellite which was the first satellite of U.S.
so we can play games yo.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/When_was_the_Internet_invented

This is far more than a "minor distinction." The World Wide Web is an APPLICATION (albeit a very, very large one) that runs on the Internet. They are not one and the same. The Internet was the outgrowth of an experiment by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency in the 1960s to link funded research locations via a computer network. That became ARPANET, which -- the story is rather long -- was eventually expanded in the United States to a number of labs and academic institutions, and then to Europe, where CERN was one of the nodes.. The Internet enables the World Wide Web, not the other way around. Tim Berners-Lee, working with others at CERN, is the inventor of the latter, but most definitely NOT of the Internet.