Internet Turns 40
40 years ago today, on 29 October 1969, the first two nodes of what became ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet, were connected, with one node residing at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at University of California, Los Angeles and the other at SRI International. The first message was sent over the network from UCLA and was supposed to read “LOGIN”, but instead read “LO”, as the computer crashed before the full message could be written. In the coming years, further work at DARPA, as ARPA was renamed in 1972, resulted in the creation of the TCP/IP protocols. In their documentation of TCP/IP, Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine used the term “Internet” to refer to a global network based on TCP/IP. The first such network came into existence on 1 January 1983, when ARPANET switched to TCP/IP from NCP.
And thus the Internet was born. The coming years saw many services become connected to the Internet, including CompuServe’s e-mail service, Usenet and telnet, with ARPANET becoming just a part of an expanding network. Commercial Internet service providers were also established, giving every one who was willing to pay access to the network.
UCLA is holding a celebration to mark the anniversary, which is being streamed live at ustream.tv/channel/internet-40th-anniversary-ucla.
Easynet Connect, a British ISP, has created a video detailing important events in the Internet’s history: