Find Your Opportunity. And at Bell Labs and Nokia, we are hard at work to create this internet, once again.First, we have to consider—what actually comprises the internet today?Well, it is of course too early to say that with any certainty, but one can foresee the critical components of technological innovation in the industrial internet age, which I think are:The most obvious observations are that a large number of individuals and organizations contributed to the invention of the internet, with a few organizations—Bell Labs in particular—playing a pre-eminent role. To quantify this a little, I assigned a ‘point’ to each of the inventions shown in Figure 1, with the exception of the foundational technologies which impact all of the domains of the internet and so were awarded a weight of 8 points (1 for each domain). The resultant analysis is shown in Figure 2, in the form of a pie chart that shows the relative fraction of the internet invented by the different pioneering organizations.The net result of this analysis in shown the graphic below. It is immediately clear that there is much more to the invention of the modern internet than the question (and prior answers) suggests.I was recently giving a talk on the past, present and future of digital networks and the underlying technologies, and I was asked for my view on ‘Who invented the internet?’ This is a question that has frequently been posed over the past couple of decades, and the answer is typically Tim Berners-Lee (WWW/HTTP), Cerf & Kahn (TCP/IP), Baran, Davies, Kleinrock & Roberts (packet networking), or Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet), or some combination of these pioneering inventors. But my personal view is that the ‘internet’ is now a much broader concept and so perhaps there is a different answer to this question in 2019. So, I decided to re-examine this question and to use a semi-quantitative approach to answering it.I have my own quite expansive or inclusive view, but rather than be subject to my own bias, I thought it would be apropos to use one of the leading sources of information on the internet: Wikipedia. The Wikipedia definition of the internet is as follows:
Bell Labs partners with universities around the world to create the next generation of researchers . Discover the experience of working at Nokia through the stories and experiences of our employees Our opportunities. Distinguished Academic Partners Program. You want to put your knowledge to work, add new skills and contribute to something big. Bell Labs is the place for you. Research. The thesis work will be conducted in Munich and it is expected to be completed within 3 years, with the possibility of one year extension.A career at Nokia, working with Bell Labs is your opportunity to help shape the future of communications. Our globe-spanning teams of researchers and consultants are dynamic, diverse and committed to innovation. Whether you’ve graduated and are ready to explore new directions, hone your skills and chase your goals, or a seasoned professional, we give you the chance to work with top experts. FootnoteFootnote: Note on scoring for ‘Bell Labs, including Nokia’: Given the various parent companies of Bell Labs over the digital age (AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent), all these inventions listed were simply ascribed to ‘Bell Labs’. [May 31, 2019 Note: Thanks to reader responses to this article, I realized I had omitted a number of critical web technologies, including Apache, Perl/Python/PHP (critical parts of the so-called ‘LAMP’ suite, in addition to Linux), as well as JBoss server suite. I also omitted database technologies (SQL language, MySQL, MongoDB, OracleDB) and distributed cloud management tools and technologies (Hadoop, MapReduce, Apache Mahout, OpenStack). Last, but by no means least, I omitted a few critical programming languages (C, C++, Objective C, C#, Java), and Swift and Kotlin on the mobile application side. After addition of these missing technologies, the result remains essentially unchanged with Bell Labs including Nokia representing 24% of the internet inventions in the weighted case (rather than 23%). I will periodically update this analysis to correct errors and omissions, as well as to recognize emerging critical internet technologies. Our globe-spanning teams of researchers and consultants are dynamic, diverse and committed to innovation. A career at Nokia, working with Bell Labs is your opportunity to help shape the future of communications.