through a common language still in use today. And that was the primary motivation of the Digital Revolution: a military research program devised to ensure the survival of networked communications following the infrastructural disablement of a nuclear strike. This is the origin of today’s internet, scribbled as if on the back of an envelope. In December 1969 four nodes – the connection points between computers – were successfully linked for the first time. Digital Comes of Age There has always been a yearning to designate someone as the inventor of the internet. History in this epoch is not so simple. Before, during and after the work of ARPANET, scores of individuals helped invent it. To each his own fame, but I believe – with the benefit of a reasonable amount of perspective – one can define 15 individuals who share a higher amount of responsibility than others for the Digital Revolution (see chart). What these men speak to is both the incremental way in which the internet evolved and that, after its first mission of national defence, the internet has been a technology