List of Internet pioneers

Instead of a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers who contributed to its early development. These include early theoretical foundations, specifying original protocols, and expansion beyond a research tool to wide deployment.

John von Neumann (1903–1957) was a founding figure of computing.Donald Knuth cites von Neumann as the inventor, in 1945, of the merge sort algorithm, in which the first and second halves of an array are each sorted recursively and then merged. Von Neumann wrote the sorting program for the EDVAC in ink, which was 23 pages long. He also worked on the philosophy of artificial intelligence with Alan Turing when the latter visited Princeton in the 1930s, and is said to have “pioneered the modern computer".

Claude Shannon (1916–2001) called the "father of modern information theory", published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. His paper gave a formal way of studying communication channels. It established fundamental limits on the efficiency of communication over noisy channels, and presented the challenge of finding families of codes to achieve capacity.

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) helped to establish a partnership between U.S. military, university research, and independent think tanks. He was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941, and from 1946 to 1947, he served as chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board. Out of this would come DARPA, which in turn would lead to the ARPANET Project. His July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think" proposed Memex, a theoretical proto-hypertext computer system in which an individual compresses and stores all of their books, records, and communications, which is then mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.

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