The story of the internet is usually told through a handful of famous men. But the real history is far more diverse, and far more interesting, than Silicon Valley’s mythology suggests.
Pick up almost any popular history of the internet and you will encounter the same cast of characters: Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. These figures made genuine and significant contributions. But the version of history built around them is radically incomplete, and the gaps are not accidental.
The infrastructure of digital communication was built by thousands of people, many of them women, people of colour, and immigrants, whose contributions have been systematically overlooked, undercredited, and in some cases actively suppressed. Recovering their stories is not merely an exercise in historical fairness. It is essential to understanding what the internet actually is, how it came to be, and, crucially, who it was designed to serve.
The Women Who Programmed the Dawn of Computing
Before there was an internet, there was computing, and before the myth of the lone male genius took hold, computing was largely considered women’s work. The ENIAC, one of the earliest general-purpose electronic computers, was programmed by six women: Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Bilas Spence, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Elizabeth Snyder Holberton, and Ruth Teitelbaum. Their work (debugging, optimising, pioneering what would become programming) was foundational. Their names were absent from almost every official photograph and publication for decades.
Grace Hopper, a US Navy rear admiral and computer scientist, developed the first compiler, software that translates human-readable code into machine instructions, and was instrumental in developing COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. Without her work, the entire edifice of modern software development would look profoundly different. She also coined the term ‘debugging’, after her team literally removed a moth from a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer. Hopper’s contributions are now acknowledged; many others’ are not.
Radia Perlman, often called ‘the mother of the internet’, invented the Spanning Tree Protocol in the 1980s, which made it possible to build large, robust, scalable networks, including the internet itself. Without her algorithm, networks would collapse under their own complexity. She is rarely mentioned in the canonical histories.
The Black Mathematicians and Scientists History Overlooked
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the ‘Hidden Figures’ whose stories were eventually dramatised in a 2016 film, were among dozens of Black women mathematicians at NASA whose calculations were foundational to American space exploration. But their contributions to the computational infrastructure that preceded digital networks remain underappreciated.
Philip Emeagwali, a Nigerian-born computer scientist, won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989 for designing a network of 65,000 processors that performed the world’s fastest computation at the time. His work on massively parallel computing was a significant contribution to the kind of distributed architecture that underpins modern internet infrastructure. He has been celebrated in Africa but remains largely unknown in the West.
Mark Dean, a Black American computer scientist at IBM, holds three of the original nine patents on the IBM personal computer, the machine that arguably democratised computing more than any other. Dean also co-created the ISA bus, which allowed devices like modems and printers to connect to personal computers. Without him, the personal computing revolution would have looked very different.
The infrastructure of digital communication was built by thousands of people whose contributions have been systematically overlooked. Recovering their stories is not merely historical fairness; it is essential.
The Indigenous and Global-South Voices That Shaped the Net
The internet was not built only in California or Massachusetts. The development of network protocols, satellite communications, and the social norms that govern online interaction involved contributors from around the world; many of whom have never received adequate recognition.
Timnit Gebru, an Ethiopian-born AI researcher, has become one of the most prominent voices on the ethics of artificial intelligence; though her story is perhaps better known as a cautionary tale about how the tech industry treats its most critical thinkers. Her departure from Google in 2020, following a dispute over a research paper on the risks of large language models, sparked a global debate about who gets to ask questions about AI’s societal impact, and whose concerns are taken seriously.
In the global South, engineers and entrepreneurs have repeatedly adapted and innovated with digital technology in ways that the Western tech industry then adopted, or failed to acknowledge. M-Pesa, the mobile money system launched in Kenya in 2007, pioneered financial technology that the rest of the world took years to catch up with. The engineers, policymakers, and communities that built it are not household names.
Why the Myth Matters
The cult of the lone genius inventor (overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male) serves a purpose. It concentrates credit, capital, and authority. It makes the extraordinary achievements of technology appear to flow naturally from a particular kind of person, in a particular kind of place, with a particular set of values. And it makes it easier to argue that the current composition of the tech industry, still strikingly homogenous at its senior levels, is natural, even inevitable.
It is not. The history of technology is a history of collective endeavour, often across lines of gender, race, and nationality, in which credit has been unequally distributed. Recovering the fuller picture is not about diminishing the contributions of those who are already celebrated. It is about understanding what innovation actually looks like, and ensuring that the people building the next generation of transformative technologies reflect the full diversity of human possibility.
The internet belongs to everyone. Its history should too.