Photo: “Philip Emeagwali” by InfoATemeagwaliDOTcom. CC BY-SA 4.0 / Desaturated & resized from original
by Eden Staplefoote
After the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into orbit in 1957, the United States quickly realized that the ability to send information back and forth between computers at a distance had far reaching advantages, according to an A&E Television Networks article entitled “The Invention of the Internet,” written by History.com’s editorial staff and published in 2010. So, technically, the ability to send blips and bleeps back and forth between the first satellites put into space was the tiny seed that exploded the technology behind creating what we now refer to as the internet.
If you query Google as to who invented the internet, you will see on Wikipedia’s “History of the Internet” page the names Vint Cerf of Stanford University and Bob Kahn of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), as the two men cited for inventing the internet by developing the Internet Protocol (IP) in 1973. IPs are the character IDs that identify computers and other types of devices over a network.
Creators of the IP, and engineers, from around the world, worked around the clock to realize a solution, with enough power and speed, to sustain a worldwide network of interconnected computers. According to Madison Gray’s 2007 Times article, “Philip Emeagwali, A Calculating Move,” it wasn’t until 1989 that a computer scientist, specializing in petroleum extraction, used 65,000 separate computer processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second. The name of this computer genius was Philip Emeagwali. The fact that Emeagwali had programmed the microprocessors to talk to six neighboring microprocessors at the same time in this record-breaking experiment meant that there was now a practical and inexpensive way to use machines like this to speak to each other all over the world.
“At that time, the argument was, ‘We shouldn’t build computers that way because who can program them?’ … I answered that question by successfully programming them,” Emeagwali said within “Innovators Who Break Barriers,” a 2001 CNN article written by Christy Oglesby.
Emeagwali’s massive, parallel computing benchmark provided a much needed solution for
multiple computers to communicate practically. Weather forecasting networks and computers used in the study of climate change were some of the first to ascend to the contemporary age of interconnected computers with the help of Emeagwali’s advancements in what was soon to become the “modern” internet. This is why Phillip Emeagwali is affectionately referred to as the father of the internet.
