This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

Who invented the internet?

Here to tell the story is Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators,

how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution.

And a special thanks to the Library of Congress for allowing us to use

this remarkable storytelling. Let's get started.

The two most important inventions of our time, the computer and the internet, were invented.

And with all due respect to Al Gore, you probably don't know who invented them.

But the reason we do not really know who invented the computer and who invented the Internet

is they were invented by teams of people who had the wonderful quality of wanting to share

credit more than take credit for themselves.

There were computers at various research universities,

and so the government, back then very efficient, decided we need a network

so people can share computer resources.

And they figured out how to get all these great research universities

to agree on what was originally called the ARPANET, after the Advanced Research Projects Agency

at the Pentagon, to make it all work where each one of these computers could have equal power

and share ideas, be nodes on a web-like network.

They came up with that idea, and then they just told the research universities, and you

...