Chris K. Bennett : Bridging The Gap

Has The Internet Changed Your Life?

Sat, Oct 31, 2009

Internet is 40 years old today

Internet

Here is what happened: The first network had four nodes, the first at UCLA, and the second at Stanford Research Institute. The other two–at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were not yet installed.

That network was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a program of the U.S. Department of Defense, created in the aftermath of the Soviets beating the U.S. into space.

On October 29, 1969, a graduate student named Charley Kline used a terminal at UCLA to contact SRI. When Kline typed the “G” in “login” the network crashed. And for some reason, we are today marking that as the “birth of the Internet.”

Fortunately, the connection was made on a later attempt and if you forget the crash, the proto-Internet was born.

Fast forward 40 years – and It’s pretty hard to imagine society without everything we’re used to about the Internet:

At a 40th birthday party for the Internet, Kleinrock – who sent that first message – talked how it’s a “democratizing element” and that everyone can have an equal voice. But he also says there’s no way back at this point, and that “we can’t turn it off.”

Kleinrock says in the future, the Internet will be “present everywhere.”