WHO INVENTED THE INTERNET? A BROTHER NAMED PHIL.

"The Internet as we know it today did not cross my mind. I was hypothesizing a planetary-sized supercomputer and, broadly speaking, my focus was on how the present creates the future and how our image of the future inspires the present." –Dr. Philip Emeagwali

Precocious. Intelligent. Gifted. Genius. Those are some of my favorite words. And when it comes to technology, and the people behind great advancements in technology, you often here those words used in descriptions of said people. Philip Emeagwali was a precocious child. He is an intelligent, gifted, genius.

Born in 1954 in Akure, Nigeria, Emeagwali came of age during the Nigerian CivilWar. He spent two years in a refugee camp along with his family until, at the age of 14, he joined in the fight for Biafran independence. Even as a child soldier, Emeagwali’s aptitude for numbers was recognizable. At the age of 15, he earned the nickname “Calculus” after publishing a book on “infinitesimal calculus” and constructing a “calculo analog computer”.

Despite war’s devastation, and despite having to drop out of school due to his father’s inability to pay for his education, young Philip continued to study on his own. He eventually completed a general education certificate from the University of London, was awarded a 4-year scholarship to Oregon State University, then earned two master’s degrees, and a doctorate in scientific computing from the University of Michigan. 

He conceived and invented the internet while at Michigan.

As a native of oil-rich Nigeria, Emeagwali understood how oil was drilled. That knowledge and experience was invaluable in the debates on the Ann Arbor campus regarding how to use computers to simulate the detection of oil reservoirs.The methodology was the subject of his dissertation. Based on an idea about predicting the weather he remembered from a science fiction story, and inspired by the construction of honeycombs, Emeagwali concluded it would be better to use the many thousands of microprocessors of smaller computers to perform computations instead of expensive supercomputers. He sought and gained permission to use the “Connection Machine” at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This machine was designed to run over 65,000 interconnected microprocessors, and was sitting unused because no one had figured out how to program it properly. That is, until a brother named Phil showed up.

In 1989, Emeagwali connected remotely to the Connection Machine and programmed it to use approximately 65,000 globally dispersed microprocessors to accurately calculate the amount of oil in a simulated reservoir. Emeagwali’s Hyperball International Network was the original World Wide Web.

No man (or woman) is an island, therefore I sincerely recognize the great works of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Khan, and Vinton Cerf.

BUT WHEN IT COMES TO 28 YEAR-OLD INTERNET, PHILIP EMEAGWALI….

Follow Me on Twitter: @TechAndDaBros