Happy Birthday Internet. Internet turns 40

[Statistical]

On this day 40 years ago, the very first e-mail message (long before they called it e-mail, of course) was sent by UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock over the ARPANET system from Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute, more than 400 miles away.

Kleinrock, while still a student at MIT, developed the principles of "packet switching," which allows the basic data-transfer functions of the Internet. As a professor at UCLA, Kleinrock helped develop ARPANET, the interconnected computer network from which the Internet evolved. Today more than 1.6 billion people around the world are connected to the network.

What was that first momentous message, you may be wondering? It said simply "lo" -- the message was meant to read "login," but the computer crashed almost immediately.

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http://www.thisisbrandx.com/2009/10/happy-birthday-internet.html

The exact date varies depending on the source but is around 28 OCT 1969 to 01 NOV 1969 depending on what constitutes the "birth" of APRANET. The first two computers connected were in same building, then test was to computer in another city, the next test was first sucessful test, two way communication took a little longer, adding ability for computers to operate without notifying other party to being "listening" took longer. So there is no good official date but the internet is "about" 40 years old.

For those who care ARPANET was originally funded by DARPA (DOD research arm) as a method to make US military networks (especially nuclear launch command) resilient to nuclear attack. By ensuring bases could connect to any surviving base the goal was to retain some level of command and control after nuclear exchange.

[PeaceNikki]

1. ha!

[derby378]

2. Happy birthday, you weird and wonderful system of tubes!

:bounce:

[ixion]

3. hizzah for the interwebs!

I don't know how I got along without you for all those years. :)

:toast: :party: :woohoo: :party: :smoke: :bounce: :woohoo: :toast:

[marmar]

4. I didn't realize the Internet was older than I am.....by 3 years even.

Happy Birthday to the Internets!!!!

:toast:

[Statistical]

7. Well most people wouldn't recognize the internet prior to 1991 (www created)

1969 - first packet switched connection between two ARPANET test computers
1973 - Papers on TCP/IP ("language of modern internet") published
1974 - first time the word "internet" is used to describe a collection to international packet switched networks.
1976 - X.25 packet switching standard formalized
1981 - unified X.25 interconnected networks grow to interconnect Europe, US, Canada, Hong Kong, and Australia.
1983 - First TCP/IP wide area network
1988 - Commercial entities approved to join internet (prior to this only military, govt, and education facilities)
1989 - MCI Mail becomes first commercial entity to offer internet connection followed by UUNET and PSINET.
1991 - first version of the "World wide web"
1996 - internet connections grew at over 100% annually for about 2 years.
2009 - approximately 1.5 billion connections to the internet.

So growth from 2 computers to 1.5 billion end users in 40 years. Not too shabby.
For most people the concept of the internet did not begin until the world wide web (www) which was 1991.

[LLStarks]

5. The delayed innovation of the personal computer really held back the Internet until the early 90s.

The World Wide Web was long perceived but technology was simply lagging.

[Statistical]

8. Well the "world wide web" didn't originate until 1991.

The TCP/IP protocol not until 1883.

Even with personal computers it is unlikely many users would have had interest in "internet" without those key components.

TCP/IP allowed a universal protocol which allowed dissimilar networks to be "hidden" from the end user.
WWW created an easily accessible point & click interface (rather than obscure command lines) to find and access information.

[Jennicut]

6. The internet is that old? I didn't have access to it until the mid 1990's

in college.

[Statistical]

9. The early internet was very different.

The "world wide web" began in Europe in 1991 (CERN) and caught like wildfire due to the easy of access it provided.

The "modern" internet was born with world wide web.

[Jennicut]

10. Thanks for the info. I was in high school when we talked about the world wide web.

I guess that was about 1993 or so.

[guyton]

11. minor nit from an old fart

Not "very first e-mail message" ... they were trying to remote login. it's called "telnet"

Email didn't come for a few years after that ... email was initially an addition to
the FTP protocol used for transferring files. The first priority was just getting
remote login access to the mainframes that were coming online.

I was late to the party, didn't get online until 1971 :-)

[Statistical]

13. Good catch. Another example of reports "dumbing down the content".

Still is funny that login crashed with only "lo" sent.

Was a "lo" point in computer science history. LOL! :)

[JVS]

12. I thought the first message was spam about getting a bigger penis.

[conscious evolution]

14. Al Gore sure was busy back then

Going to law school,inventing the internet and inspiring Love story must have left little time for sleep
Good thing he had Dan Quayle to invent spell check or he would have never had time to sleep.

[guyton]

17. Al Gore *did* create the internet!

When he was a senator, he sponsored the legislation that opened up the Internet to commercial use!

Before then, ARPANet (and the initial Internet) was strictly a non-commerical testbed for ARPA, DOD and
other US government contractors.

There was a whole network (CSNet) created just because most universities weren't *allowed* to join the Internet.

Gore's legislation changed all that.

So while he had nothing to do with the technical issues of creating the network, he had a lot to do with it
becoming the world-wide commerce system it is today.

[conscious evolution]

19. I knew I should have used

this smiley :silly:

I figured the Quayle thing would have tipped people off that I was joking around.

[timeforpeace]

22. "he sponsored the legislation" Wow, that's huge. No wonder he takes the credit.

[Tesha]

15. What a bunch of IMPs! (NT)

[Arugula Latte]

16. I'm older than the Internet.

:cry:

[LeftishBrit]

18. Hmm; older than I thought it was!

[Kurovski]

20. WTF!!!???

Then why is it I've been downloading porn for only FIFTEEN years???!!!

[unc70]

21. The roots of the Internet go back further than ARPANET

I posted about this in another thread, but I am reposting because it is important to get history correct.

While the events forty years ago were an important part of the efforts that led to what we now call the Net, there were many others that were much earlier, including several where I was involved. It is easy for those of you not around back then to be unaware of the large timeshare computer networks that were in regular operations long before any of the ARPANET or other "official" parents of the Internet. If you are under 40, what you think you "know" about early computing is probably as wrong as what you know about Vietnam or the Civil War. I was there for early computing and for Vietnam; the Civil War for me is second hand.

The DARPA work 40 years ago, while important, was just one of many networking projects, many having begun much earlier and were already in daily operation. Even the "packet switching" aspect was included in some of these already-existing systems. BBN, which implemented the IMPs, was one of many suppliers of timesharing and related networks. If I remember correctly, the initial IMPs were based on existing designs already in use for TS work.

Consider this example from over forty years ago here in North Carolina, the TUCC network supported the three primary universities (UNC, Duke, NC State), IBM, several other businesses, and a total of 45 colleges around the state through the NCECS network (North Carolina Educational Computing Service). While some of these schools might have just remote card reader/printer sites and a few had little more than a few Teletype terminals, other locations had extensive computer-to-computer networks. It would take quite a number of years before the initial ARPANET work would function at the level of the every-day production 1969 NCECS network.

While most of the connections of the NCECS were typical of 1960's time-shared or batch operations, there were a number of specialized devices on these networks (e.g. CalComp plotters). In 1968, I added support for a bit-mapped graphics device (the CC-30) -- quite slow over a modem and not very good resolution either. (That was using BTAM on 2701 controller; in 1969-70 I did animations on a CC-30 channel-attached to a PDP-8.)

Read about timesharing (e.g. DTSS) and networks (e.g. Burroughs Poll-Select/Contention) and you might be surprised at what existed in the late 1960's. You might even find email and markup languages long before HTML. Try looking at some of the early NCECS articles with authors like Brooks, Gallie, or Freeman.

BTW all these things predated things like Unix and C by many years. It is a shame that so much valueable experience was discarded by universities and professors without a clue what they were doing. But that is for another really long rant.

[kickysnana]

23. Delete answer posted above mine as I was typing thanks.