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Where did the Internet come from?

Where did the Internet come from?

It's not what you think

George Pillari
November 20, 2025

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For the 15 years following World War II, the US offered asylum to more than 1,500 German and Austrian scientists and engineers. Some were strong-armed into leaving the Nazi party, but at the end of the war, the US made the calculation that it could not afford to see the richest deposit of scientific brainpower on the planet fall into the hands of the Japanese or the Soviets.

Operation Paperclip infused the US with a tremendous amount of expertise to advance its nascent space program. But it wasn’t enough.

In 1957, the Soviets literally shook the world by launching Sputnik into space. Sputnik was not much more than a beach ball sized metallic globe with antennae sticking out. Sputnik sent radio signals from space back to Earth. So, what was the big deal?

Sputnik

The Soviets were able to launch an object into space, and the US could not. First it was a satellite, but the world in general, and the US military in particular, were more concerned about what else could the Soviets launch into space?

How about an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM)? Since the US and Soviets each now had nuclear capabilities, did the Soviets have the ability to launch an ICBM loaded with nuclear warheads into space and drop the bombs on the US? (From launch to impact, it may have required something like 20 minutes.)

ICBM silo

The US responded by loudly declaring it was a space race between the two superpowers. Whoever controlled space, controlled the ultimate military high ground and the US wanted that control. The second way the US responded was not so visible and not so loud. It funded a bunch of academic researchers to build the precursor to the Internet.

Originally named ARPANET after the government agency that was building it (Advanced Research Projects Agency or “ARPA”), the system was supposed preserve communications in the US in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike.

Existing communications infrastructure utilized telephone lines and centralized switching and routing where calls came into a switchboard and were then directed to the endpoint. This system was vulnerable to collapse if one or more of the central switchboards were knocked out.

An centralized switchboard to route calls

The answer was to decentralize communications so that if some cities or military installations were destroyed in an attack, communications could be re-routed through ARPANET so that our military leaders were not blind and could still plan retaliatory tactics.

This was an enormous shift in the balance of power in a wartime scenario since destroying an opponent’s communications was always a top priority in a battle. With connectivity to so many universities and military bases, ARPANET was almost impossible to defeat, and US communications would continue even in a drastic scenario.

ARPANET started out with a handful of institutions and as it grew into a series of networks, the internetwork was born. The internetwork connected all the networks using a common set of standards that were universally adopted. The name was shortened to Internet a short time after it was up and running.

The Internet connected everything

Through the 1980s and 1990s as Cold War tensions eased, and the superpowers realized that any nuclear attack would result in Mutually Assured Destruction, the support and management of the Internet was turned over to non-governmental entities like the telecommunications companies and the commercial Internet went mainstream.

Necessity is truly the mother of invention.

Key Takeaways

The Americans thought they had all the intellectual capital for technological superiority. The Soviets had fire in the belly.
You think it was easy to get agreement on ARPANET and how things would work? Fighting a common enemy tends to bring people together.
If you are starting a company, figure out not an AI angle, but one that uses national defense. Investors will listen.

Things I think about

Solar panels have a function called “hail tilt.” When a hail storm is forecast, the panels rotate from being flat to facing up and down, minimizing the damage from hail.