The internet celebrates its 50th Birthday today; check out its birth certificate

The internet celebrates its 50th Birthday today; check out its birth certificate

FPJ Web DeskUpdated: Wednesday, October 30, 2019, 02:50 PM IST
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Today we all spend a fair amount of time online. Considering the impact that the internet has on our lives daily through all the social media, banking, news etc, how many of us know about the start of this great revolution.

Today most of us spend our time online on social media sites, online shopping, browsing for information and content, but do we wonder how we reached this point?

Exactly fifty years ago, on October 29, 1969, the internet was born. Arpanet was the first real network to run on packet switching technology. It was a single login from a computer terminal at UCLA in Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the Bay Area. In effect, they were the first hosts on what would one day become the Internet. It was a tiny baby step that would eventually catapult the world into the information age.

The first message sent across the network was supposed to be “Login”, but reportedly, the link between the two colleges crashed on the letter “g”. So the first word to be sent was Lo.

Amazingly, there is a piece of paper that documents that important moment for the internet, first called the Arpanet because it was a project funded by ARPA.

The computer terminal operators kept a detailed logbook of everything that was happening as they set up the network. On October 29, 1969, there is a notebook entry at 22:30 (10:30 pm): “Talked to SRI, Host to Host.”

That sheet of paper, which currently sits at the archives of UCLA, is more or less the internet’s birth certificate—a written record of that moment when the two host computers at UCLA and SRI started communicating for the very first time, thus giving birth to the internet and opening a whole world of possibilities.

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