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Inventions That Changed the Internet

The patents behind the infrastructure and protocols the modern internet runs on.

The internet as we use it today was built on a stack of critical inventions — most of which were patented, and several of which became controversial precisely because of how fundamental they turned out to be. RSA encryption (1977) is why HTTPS exists. LZW compression (1983) powered GIF images before the web even existed, then sparked the first major software patent controversy. PageRank (1998) made search actually useful. Frequency hopping spread spectrum — Hedy Lamarr's 1942 patent — became the foundation of WiFi and Bluetooth. None of these inventors could have known what they were building toward.

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