Who invented the Internet?

A single person did not create the Internet that we know and use today. Below is a listing of several different people who have helped contribute and develop the Internet.

The idea 

The initial idea is credited as being Leonard Kleinrock's after he published his first paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" on May 31, 1961. In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider became the first Director of IPTO and gave his vision of a galactic network. In addition to ideas from Licklider and Kleinrock, Robert Taylor helped create the idea of the network that later became ARPANET.

Initial creation 

The Internet as we know it today first started being developed in the late 1960's. In the summer of 1968, the Network Working Group (NWG) held its first meeting chaired by Elmer Shapirowith the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) with attendees: Steve Carr, Steve Crocker, Jeff Rulifson, andRon Stoughton. In the meeting, the group discussed solving issues related to getting hosts to communicate with each other. In December 1968, Elmer Shapiro with SRI released a report "A Study of Computer Network Design Parameters." Based on this work and earlier work done by Paul Baraon, Thomas Marill and others;Lawrence Roberts and Barry Wessler helped to create the final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) was later awarded the contract to design and build the IMP subnetwork.

General public learns about Internet   

UCLA puts out a press release introducing the public to the Internet on July 3, 1969. 

First network equipment

August 29, 1969 the first network switch and the first piece of network equipment called "IMP", which is short for (Interface Message Processor) is sent to UCLA.  On September 2, 1969 the first data moves from UCLA host to the switch. In the picture to the right, is a picture of Leonard Kleinrock next to the IMP. 

First graphical Internet browser

Mosaic is the first widely used graphical World Wide Web browser developed and first released on April 22, 1993 by the NCSA with the help of Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. A big competitor to Mosaic was Netscape, which was released a year later. Today, most of the Internet browsers we use today, e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. got their inspiration from the Mosaic browser.

Java and JavaScript

Originally known as oak, Java is a programming language developed by James Gosling and others at Sun Microsystems that was first introduced to the public in 1995 and today is widely used to create Internet applications and other software programs.
Originally developed by Brendan Eich and known as LiveScript, which was renamed to JavaScript in 1995. JavaScript is an interpreted client-side scripting language that allows a web designer the ability to insert code into their web page.