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Internet! You’re OLD!

October 30th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz

The question of when the internet was born is a matter of some debate, but if you go by PC World’s version of things, then the web turned 40 yesterday:

On October 29, 1969, the Internet came in not with a bang, but with a “lo.”

Letter by letter, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from his school’s host computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock was trying to write “login,” starting up a remote time-sharing system, but the system crashed after two letters, and lo! The Internet was born with the first data message sent between two networked computers.

To be fair, the creation of the Internet was peppered with other milestones that could be considered more or less historic. After all, at the core of the Internet was packet-switching–the process of breaking down data into blocks and routing them individually–and in 1968 Donald Davies of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory gave the first public presentation of the idea.

But if we can all agree that communication–e-mail, chat, social networking–is what makes the Internet tick, Kleinrock’s first message was the most significant early step towards what we have today.

Look how far we’ve come–and how much further we’ve yet to go. The internet started with a lo, evolved into a social stream–what will come next? How much more pervasive will it be in another 40 years?

I can’t wait to find out.

pass it on!

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Internet! You’re OLD!

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