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What does the invention of the Internet and SPUTNIK have to do with each other? Many factors have contributed in the development of the Internet. The original core suite of components consisted of the Transport Control Protocol or TCP and Internet Protocol or IP known as TCP/IP. Other factors include papers written in 1961 and going back further, yes, one could say that SPUTNIK can even be considered a contributor to the development of the Internet.

If you had to choose a single development that contributed most in the development of what is known as the Internet today it would be the development of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in 1972-1973 later publishing, in detail, the TCP design in the paper “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection” in 1974.

Why TCP is important for the Internet is that TCP allows an application that is requested or desires to send data over the Internet using IP to send a single request to TCP instead of breaking the data up to IP sized data and issuing many IP requests. TCP detects lost or out-of-order packets; requesting lost packets to be resent and rearranging out-of-order packets, passing the datagram to the application program. TCP helps minimize network congestion.

How did it all start though? In 1957, the USSR successfully launched SPUTNIK, the first artificial earth satellite. The US did not like this and, in 1958 in retaliation, they formed the DODs Advanced Research Projects Agency known as ARPA.   This agency would lead in science and technology and in 1961 the first paper was published on Packet Switching (PS) theory by Leonard Kleinrock. Packet Switching allows simultaneous processes and routing, so if a process uses just a small amount of resources, then a different process is dealt with. This allows packets destined for millions of users to share the same connection.

Who would ever guess that SPUTNIK was one of the catalysts for today’s Internet?  Different developments by different people since 1957 have contributed to the Internet. Perhaps, the single most important development was TCP in 1973. If it were not for a decade or two of research and cooperation, the Internet would never have been developed, so to state one development or person to have invented the Internet would be misleading