Founding of Akamai Technologies

Founded by MIT Professor F. Thomson Leighton and graduate student Danny Lewin, Akamai pioneered the Content Delivery Network (CDN), deploying servers globally to cache and deliver web content closer to users.

Significance

Akamai's CDN was the first major commercial success demonstrating the power of distributing computational resources (content caching) to the 'edge' of the network to overcome latency and bandwidth issues, effectively laying the conceptual foundation for edge computing.