• 50 years ago today, the internet was born

    Posted on October 29, 2019 at 07:23 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    Fascinating story from Mark Sullivan at Fast Company:

    When I visited UCLA’s Boelter Hall last Wednesday, I took the stairs to the third floor, looking for Room 3420. And then I walked right by it. From the hallway, it’s a pretty unassuming place.

    But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California. It was the beginning of ARPANET, the small network of academic computers that was the precursor to the internet.

    I remember the first time I used ARPANET. I was a grad student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, early ’70s, and we had small PCs (HPs?) that were used to send email. The procedure, as I recall, was quite complex – but it worked, and it was thrilling to communicate with folks at other Universities.

    It took many years – and a trip through Compuserve, various bulletin boards and Microsoft’s fledgling MSN – before I returned to the Internet. We’ve come a long way in a very short time, eh?

    UPDATE: Ann Bednarz at NetworkWorld has a great, nostalgic look.

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