Theo Mercer

ARPANET and the First Network of Distant Computers

ARPANET linked research computers through packet-switching nodes, created a community for network protocols, and provided the experimental environment from which Internet architecture emerged.

TCP/IP and the Invention of a Network of Networks

TCP/IP solved a different problem from ARPANET: how to connect multiple independent networks without forcing them to share one internal design.

Ethernet and the Local Network That Connected the Personal Computer Office

Ethernet emerged at Xerox PARC as a way to connect Alto workstations, servers and printers, then became the dominant local-area networking family through standardization and continual evolution.

Network Email and the @ Sign: How Messaging Became the Internet’s First Social Application

Ray Tomlinson's ARPANET mail experiment joined local mailbox software with network file transfer and established the user@host addressing convention that became a universal symbol of online identity.

DNS and the Decision to Turn Internet Naming into a Distributed Database

The Domain Name System replaced a centrally distributed host file with a hierarchical, delegated and cached naming database capable of scaling with a rapidly growing Internet.

The World Wide Web: How CERN Turned the Internet into a Universal Information Space

Tim Berners-Lee's Web joined universal identifiers, hypertext, a simple transfer protocol and portable document markup into an open information system that could spread across the Internet.

HTTP, HTML, and URLs: The Three Agreements That Made the Web Interoperable

The early Web worked because independently built clients and servers could agree on three things: how to identify resources, how to request representations, and how to encode linked documents.

NCSA Mosaic and the Browser That Made the Web Easy to Enter

NCSA Mosaic did not invent the Web or the first browser, but its reliability, cross-platform distribution and approachable graphical presentation helped move the Web from research communities toward mass adoption.

REST and the Decision to Treat the Web as Resources and Representations

Roy Fielding's REST described the architectural constraints behind the scalable Web and later gave developers a vocabulary for designing network APIs around resources, representations and uniform interfaces.

Packet Switching and the Decision to Break Communication into Pieces

Packet switching replaced the idea of reserving one continuous circuit with a network that could divide data into independently routed packets, a foundation of modern digital networking.