# The Origin of the *Internet*

My pre-scientific thesis in high school: how an American research project from 1958 became the network almost everything runs on today. The first long-form paper with sources, citation rules and supervision, submitted in February 2020.

> Project page: https://clemenshoeller.at/en/projects/vwa
> Category: school/internet-history

## Key facts

- **Format** · VWA, literature-based
- **School** · BG Zehnergasse, Wiener Neustadt
- **Submitted** · February 2020
- **Length** · 38 pages

- Full thesis as PDF ↗: https://clemenshoeller.at/projects/vwa-entstehung-und-entwicklung-des-internets.pdf
- Back to education: https://clemenshoeller.at/#edu

## /01 The question

Every Matura in Austria starts with a pre-scientific thesis: the first longer piece of independent work with a research question, sources and citation rules. Mine asked two questions that were bigger back then than they sound: **when and why did the internet come into being?** And: **what is it made of, how does it work, which technical foundations does it need?**

The topic was not a choice of convenience. The internet was my most constant everyday companion, and from computer science class I knew just enough to suspect how much I did not know. So I used the opportunity to understand it from the ground up: from the first idea to the protocols carrying every single connection.

## /02 Approach

The thesis is literature-based: no data collection of my own, but a synthesis of books and technical sources, from Castells' "Internet Galaxy" through Springer volumes on internetworking and IP networks to Berners-Lee's original 1991 announcement of the World Wide Web. Cited in APA style, supervised at school.

The structure follows two halves:

- **The history:** in 1958, after the Sputnik shock, the USA founds ARPA. In 1969 four universities connect the first network nodes of the Arpanet. Then TCP/IP, the first e-mail, the World Wide Web at CERN, the interactive Web 2.0 and finally the Internet of Things.
- **The technology:** the infrastructure behind it, the OSI reference model and TCP/IP as layered models, IPv4 and IPv6, MAC addresses, the hierarchical structure of the Domain Name System and the anatomy of a URL.

The ambition for the second half was to explain the technical building blocks so they could be understood without prior knowledge. In hindsight, that was the real exercise: translating complex technology into plain language.

## /03 Results

A literature-based thesis produces a picture rather than measurements. The picture here: within roughly sixty years, a militarily motivated research project became the infrastructure through which, at the time of writing, about half of humanity communicated, shopped and learned.

The insight that stayed with me is in the conclusion: the internet is the way it is because of specific decisions, specific developers and a whole series of coincidences. Packet switching was chosen so a network would keep working even when damaged. The web began at CERN as an internal tool. None of it was inevitable, and that is exactly what makes the history instructive.

## /04 In context

To be honest about it: this is a school thesis, not research. It is here anyway because it marks the start of a thread that has run through everything since. In 2020 I did not yet know it would become business informatics. But the thesis dug exactly there: networks, protocols and the question of how technology shapes our behavior.

Five years later my bachelor's thesis asked how AI changes the way we search that very network. And this website itself runs on exactly the building blocks the thesis explains: a DNS record resolves clemenshoeller.at, HTTP delivers the page, TCP/IP carries every packet. The circle closes as you read.

**Skills gained:** Academic writing · Literature research · APA citation · Explaining technology clearly · Structuring long-form texts

## /05 Related projects

These projects connect more tightly than the tiles on the home page suggest. Here are all the others, sorted by how closely they relate to this thesis:

- [Google vs. ChatGPT](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/google-vs-chatgpt)
- [This Website](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/diese-website)
- [Prompt Injection](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/prompt-injection)
- [LLMs & Creativity](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/llms-kreativitaet)
- [AI Automations](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/ki-automatisierungen)
- [Healthcare Fraud Detection](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/fraud-detection)
- [AI Talent Gap](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/ai-talent-gap)
- [Consulting Cases](https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/consulting-cases)

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*German version: https://clemenshoeller.at/projekte/vwa.md*
*Pre-scientific thesis (BG Zehnergasse, 2020): a literature-based paper on the history of the internet from ARPA to Web 2.0 and its technical building blocks from TCP/IP to DNS. Full PDF included.*