Thirty years ago, back in 1994, the largest companies in the world were automobile and oil companies – Ford, GM and Exxon – while today’s largest corporations are all information technology businesses: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Amazon, all from on the west coast of the US.

The key development that spurred this spectacular growth has been the internet and the World Wide Web, the ‘central nervous system’ of today’s global economy.

It is widely accepted the internet was an American invention, developed from the original Arpanet of the late 1960s and opened up to widespread commercial use in the mid 1990s.

But the origin of the key technology behind it, “packet switching”, is not so simple.

Was it really as American as apple pie?

In fact, Donald Davis, a British computer scientist working for the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK, wrote the first-ever description of packet switching in a paper in 1965. 

In this paper he even accurately forecasted what his invention would make possible: “The greatest traffic could only come if the public used this means for everyday purposes such as shopping... People sending enquiries and placing orders for goods of all kinds will make up a large section of the traffic... Business use of the telephone may be reduced by the growth of the kind of service we contemplate.”

Packet switching technology splits a message into small individual packets of data that travel independently through the internet before being re-assembled at the destination. 

A key aspect of this system is its inherent reliability – it automatically diverts and recovers around any failure in transmission.

The NPL went on to build packet-switched networks which transmitted large amounts of data, including digital transmission of speech communications.

This was all revolutionary stuff and too much for the established telephone companies to embrace, given that their business at that time was installing normal speech lines. Both the GPO and AT&T, responsible for telephone services in the UK and the US, showed absolutely no interest in taking it on. 

As far as Britain was concerned this “thumbs down” from the GPO effectively killed off all funding for this area of research in the UK.

But in the US, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later, DARPA) became its biggest supporter and, at an October 1967 symposium, the early “Arpanet” proposal was presented. 

At this meeting, NPL’s paper was presented describing how the data communications for such a resource-sharing network could be implemented.

From then on, it was US defence-funded technology that drove these developments. In the UK, one computer scientist, Peter Kirstein at University College London, became deeply involved in the development of emerging internet protocols. Kirstein was ordered to stop working on the internet – fortunately an order he decided to ignore. 

As a result, by the time the Arpanet was turning into the internet, Kirstein was the only person working on it in the UK.

This explains not only why the internet is regarded as a US initiative, but also that the UK wasn’t involved in the early exploitation of this key technology.

Twenty-five years later, British citizen Tim Berners-Lee developed his World Wide Web while based at CERN. As a physics research centre, CERN did not regard his project as strategically important and allocated no funding to it. When I met with him in November 1990, I was running Edinburgh-based OWL and his prototype World Wide Web was only on his own NeXT computer. But he was keen to add a browser – the user interface that makes it easy to use. 

(Image: Francois G. Durand)

In his book Weaving The Web, he writes: “The version … by OWL looked astonishingly like what I had envisioned for a Web browser, the program that would open and display documents, and preferably let people edit them, too… They’ve already done the difficult bit I thought.”

But as he had no funding, and as I was running a commercial business, we couldn’t develop his browser. Three years later, the publicly-funded US National Centre for

Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Illinois developed the Mosaic browser that enabled the World Wide Web to become the technology that transformed the internet for public use.

Berners-Lee was then attracted to move to MIT in Boston to develop the World Wide Web Consortium. No UK institution offered him a home to develop his revolutionary technology.

So, although both the technology behind the internet and World Wide Web were invented by the British, they were both developed in the US. 

And there are lots of other similar examples such as the early computing developments behind the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Which begs the question: Is there anything more we could do to economically benefit from our own inventions?

Or are we always destined to hand them over to Uncle Sam?