The history of the internet can be traced back to the aftermath of World War II and in the heat of the Cold War. In these days the biggest threat was not necessarily another ground invasion like Hitler did with the Sudetenland, but instead the fear of nuclear fallout. This lead to an arms race between the NATO aligned nations and the Warsaw Pact aligned nations. Primarily the United States and the USSR. One thing that was feared was that if the Russians nuked a major city like Washington D.C., all the information being held in that city would be lost, so instead of making paper copies of every piece of information that could be distributed, scientists came up with a plan to connect a series of computers together to link the nation together so that all the information may be shared electronically. This lead to the creation of DARPANET which was a series of networks which allowed information to be shared so that if one major information center got hit then it would not limit the amount of information that was available.

This blows my mind that the first makings of the internet was developed so long ago, because the technology they had in the 60’s was vastly limited to what we have today. I am also a naïve young person who has the belief that the internet first started with Google and is a recent innovation of man. I just think that the imagination of those back in the 60’s was almost looked at as nonsense or science fiction, with the example of Vannevar Bush’s idea of the memex that he wrote about in “As We May Think” that basically describes the functioning of a modern day computer. I feel that his idea may have been met with fierce criticism as that idea seems very impossible considering the technology available. That makes me wonder if any other inventors had ideas that were out there that were just pushed to the side because of how ridiculous they sounded, and I also wonder if any of those ideas exist today.