A lot of people have actually posited the silly notion that Bill Gates invented the Internet. While the man who spent fourteen years as the richest individual on Earth (and still would be, if he had not literally given away half of his fortune) is a great target for the kinds of stories that usually only revolve around Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee, this is simply not the case. Bill Gates was a child when the Internet was first created. And while he did play a huge role in making this collection of different computers work well together (by essentially instituting a unilateral operating system and a web browser whose rules everyone could design their sites to work with), his involvement in its creation was minimal.
The Internet began as a military network back in the 1960s. The Cold War had a lot of generals desiring a rapid way to accomplish communication and coordination of increasingly large, sophisticated forces. So a group of scientists were commissioned, in a style not terribly dissimilar to the Manhattan Project, to figure out how to network computers together. And at first, the attempts to do so were… less than stellar in their success rates. The first email, for instance, only got through one word before the first random disconnection in history occurred. However, the designers kept with the project, and by the late 1970s a series of message boards represented the first modern prototype for the Internet.
The world’s first website was posted to the brand new Internet in 1989, ushering in an era of rapid innovation, and creating an entirely new language for people to speak. “Cyberspace” became “The Internet,” which finally became “Online,” until the notion that someone was not online became the more aberrant concept in most people’s minds. The Internet has evolved slowly, as many of the same systems and configurations which were designed and implemented in the 1970s are still in operation right now.