Larry Roberts: He Made The Net Work

A half-dozen individuals have been hailed as father of the Internet. Scores of others also had a hand in birthing this network. But the person who sifted through the contending technologies and drew up the blueprint for a networking infrastructure -- then actually made it work -- was Lawrence G. Roberts.

Roberts' baby was ARPAnet, the Internet's predecessor. But he never laid claim to the original idea. The Net's inspirational father was J.C.R. Licklider (1915-90), a psychologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who outlined his dream of a Galactic Network in the early 1960s. Then, during a stint at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA (now DARPA), "Lick" pretty much described today's Net.