How the Internet was invented

The Internet is so vast and formless that it’s hard to imagine it being invented. It’s easy to picture Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is easy to visualize. You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle. The Internet is the opposite. It’s everywhere, but we only see it in glimpses. The Internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and e-mail, but its essence is always elsewhere. This feature of the Internet makes it seem extremely complex. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. But it doesn’t. The Internet is fundamentally simple. And that simplicity is the key to its success.