The original backbone of the Internet is based on an old military network calledARPANET which was built by ARPA in the late 1960's. ARPANET was built so information could withstand a nuclear war. The idea was not to have a single point of failure. This means if part of the ARPANET was blown up in a nuclear war, the rest of it will still work! What made ARPANET so successful was it's packet-switching technology, invented by Lawrence Roberts. The idea is that "packets" of information have a "from" address and a "to" address. How they get from point "a" to point "b" depends on what roads are open to them. Packet switching is a very elegant thing. Without it, the Internet would simply not work.