The internet and the Web
Vint CerfRobert KahnPaul BaranDonald DaviesTim Berners-Lee
This page delivers no verdict; it presents claims and evidence with their sources. No theory in science is absolute. Method
For everyone
On the ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet, the first message was sent from UCLA to Stanford on 29 October 1969. The idea of packet switching, splitting data into small packets, was developed independently by Paul Baran in the US and Donald Davies in the UK. TCP/IP, described by Cerf and Kahn in 1974, made it possible to connect different networks. Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, and the Web became the most common way of using the internet.
For specialists
The internet is a network of networks that works on the end-to-end principle without a central point of control. ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on 1 January 1983; the Domain Name System (DNS) was defined in 1983. The Web is a hypertext system consisting of HTTP, HTML and URLs, and was put into the public domain royalty-free by CERN in 1993.
Claims
- Networks of different kinds can be joined into a single network of networks through a common packet format and gateways.[1]
Evidence
Supporting
Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal describes a distributed hypertext system linking documents at CERN, which became the basis of the Web.[3]
Challenging
—
Positions
- Popular account
- ARPANET was built as a communications network that would keep working after a nuclear attack.[2]
- The builders' own account
- Baran's packet-switching work was motivated by survivability under nuclear attack, but ARPANET's aim was to let researchers share expensive computers; the two lines merged later.[2]
Connections
Sources
- Article (1974). A protocol for packet network intercommunication. IEEE Transactions on Communications 22(5), 637–648DOI 10.1109/TCOM.1974.1092259archive
- Article (2009). A brief history of the internet. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39(5), 22–31DOI 10.1145/1629607.1629613archive
- Report (1989). Information Management: A Proposal. CERNw3.orgarchive
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Cite this page
Athena contributors. (2026). The internet and the Web. Athena: The tree of human knowledge. Retrieved November 1, 2026, from https://latifkedi.github.io/athena/en/d/internet/
@misc{athena_internet,
title = {The internet and the Web},
author = {{Athena contributors}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://latifkedi.github.io/athena/en/d/internet/}},
note = {Athena: The tree of human knowledge. Accessed: 2026-11-01}
}Added: September 28, 2026 · Last changed: September 28, 2026 · Page history