In the remote mountain region of Annapurna in Nepal, which can only be reached after several days of travel on foot, Mahabir Pun has defied the odds and connected 60,000 people to the Internet.

Recognized for inventing technology fundamental to the growth of the Internet, Radia Perlman becomes a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame's 2016 class of inductees.

When historians of the future study the ways information technology affected people’s lives in the late 20th century, they will surely recognise e-mail as one of the most profound. Today, about 2.5m e-mails are sent every second. The first e-mail of all, though, was sent 45 years ago by Ray Tomlinson.

Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and a technological leader, has died, confirmed his employer, Raytheon Co. Email existed in only a limited capacity before Tomlinson, but his 1971 invention changed all that.  

Late in the evening on February 8, 1996, John Perry Barlow declared independence for a new territory, free from world governments: cyberspace. 

While the history of Internet development involves many names and was not reliant on a single discovery, it is also true that certain innovations have done more to enable better networks for all. It is with that idea in mind that we’d like to profile the achievements made by Radia Perlman, the inventor of spanning tree protocol (STP) and a 2016 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

To most of the web surfing public, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is the face of the Archive’s web archiving activities. Via a simple interface, anyone can type in a URL and see how it has changed over the last 20 years. Yet, behind that simple search box lies an exquisitely complex assemblage of datasets and partners that make possible the Archive’s vast repository of the web.

David Clark’s office on the MIT campus is at the top of a tower that looks like a twisted aluminum column. The name plate next to his office door reads “Albus Dumbledore.” And, like the leader of Harry Potter’s wizarding world, Clark knows the Internet’s secrets from the beginning. 

Public Interest Registry — the not-for-profit manager of .org, .ngo and .ong — today announced the appointment of Dorcas Muthoni to the board of directors of nonprofit domain registrar Enset, a subsidiary organization. Muthoni, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame and CEO and founder of OPENWORLD LTD, will begin a two-year term as director this month.

The ARPANET came before it. And the World Wide Web and browser technology would later make it accessible for the masses. But in between, a small Ann Arbor-based group labored on the NSFNET in relative obscurity to build—and ultimately to save—the Internet.