Ask anyone where the internet came from and they will likely guess the USA.

But a new display on our doorstep explains how the worldwide web came from the work of home-grown British talent.

On Friday (4 December) the fascinating and eye-opening exhibition, The Birth of Packet Switching, opened at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park.

And while packet switching may not be an immediately familiar term, what it represents is undoubtedly a vital part of modern life – how data is communicated around the world.

Funded and created by the British National Physical Laboratory (NPL) the exhibition looks at the people whose innovative work led to the first high-speed computer network and ultimately to the internet as we know it today.

Kevin Murrell ,TNMOC director and trustee, said: "Now used by more than one in four of the world's population, the internet is the phenomenon of our age and the new gallery sets out to explain the technologies that have made it possible."

Set within the grounds of Bletchley Park – which itself played an essential and pioneering role in computing history – the exhibition charts the work of NPL and its chief computer scientist Donald Davies.

Mr Davies died in 2000 but present at the exhibition's opening was one of his contemporaries, Brian Aldous.

He said: "Donald figured a way to break data into small pieces and send it through a network.

"Imagine you want to send a big book, like the Bible, by fax.

What you could do is photocopy each page, fax them and give instructions to the recipient on how to reassemble at the other end.

"Obviously the network is only occupied for the time it takes to send one page, whereas if you were able to send the Bible in its entirety the network would be occupied for a very long and unbroken time."

Until 1971 scientists at the NPL's expansive site in Teddington, London, had to traipse many miles to access data in the laboratory's main computer.

But with Davies' invention of packet switching, the Teddington site became the first place in the world to have its own high-speed computer network.

And it set in place the very principles we rely on for landline, mobile phone and internet technology today – benefiting everything from personal communication to medical, military and many more systems.

The exhibition forms part of the National Museum of Computing, itself an enlightening and accessible look at the history of computers.

It has opened the same week Milton Keynes Council is examining BT's piloting of super fast broadband.

To find out more, call MK 374708, or visit the museum's website at www.tnmoc.org