Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn have always been generous in acknowledging the contributions of others to the beginning of the internet. So if they are the Fathers of the Internet, Nikola Tesla may be the grandfather.

Librarian Jean Armour Polly along with African pioneer Adiel Akplogan are among this year's 11 inductees to the Internet Hall of Fame.

Larry Irving was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame on Friday, becoming the first African American to be inducted into the group since its founding in 2012.

Danny Cohen, a computer scientist whose work in the 1960s and ’70s on computer graphics and networks led to innovations in flight simulation, internet telephony, cloud computing and one of the first online dates — with him — died on Aug. 12 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 81.

Right alongside Moore’s Law, which describes the exponential growth in computing power since the 1960s, there’s Metcalfe’s Law, which describes what we’ve done with all that power: namely, use it to connect the world.

Bob Metcalfe co-invented Ethernet, the communications standard still used for most local on-site networking, but Radia Perlman made it work. Her creation of the Spanning Tree Protocol while working for Digital Equipment Corporation in 1983 made it possible to link individual Ethernet networks into a vast interconnected system—that is, the thing we now call the internet.

You probably feel pretty comfortable navigating the internet. You might even be among the 1 in 5 people who created a website. Or maybe you're part of the 48% with "make a website" on their to-do list. But could you correctly say what a safe URL actually looks like? If you can't, you wouldn't be alone.

People are more connected to each other than they have ever been. For that, you can partly thank Robert Metcalfe.

Bob Metcalfe started working with computer networks in the 1970s and was part of Xerox’s Palo Alto, Calif. team that invented what would become Ethernet, the foundational technology used to connect computers. He’s known as “the father of Ethernet.”

Sputnik has spoken to Ben Segal, the developer of the internet computer network at CERN and one of the mentors of Tim Berners-Lee to find out whether the people beind the world web and the internet regret their invention, who paid for the first intercontinental computer network, can the internet be completely turned off around the world and why black swans today determine the development of information technology.