The internet as we know it emerged out of the Protocol Wars, which is as nerdy as it sounds but also somehow involved the Pentagon

A photograph of Nvidia NVL72 AI servers, as used by AI company Lambda.

I often take the internet for granted. Over the years it's taken many forms but the underlying technology has mostly remained the same. However, even the very foundation of the internet as we know it was not always a given. To that end, I was recently told about the Protocol Wars of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

The Protocol Wars is mentioned in passing in Sir Tim Berners-Lee's new book This is for Everyone, and Sir Berners-Lee is often called the inventor of the World Wide Web, so I should probably take what he says seriously. Berners-Lee essentially married HTML (the visual webpage code we see every day) to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Domain Name System (DNS), which were already in operation.