Internet Turns 40

'LO' - two mere alphabets that have gone down in history, as the first message to be sent, from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to a recipient computer at Stanford Research Institute, 314 miles away, thanks to the invention of what is better known today as the Internet. Of course the fact that, the original message was supposed to be log in and that the computer it was sent to crashed, milliseconds after receiving the first two alphabets, is but a minor detail.

Forty years ago, on October 29, 1969, Leonard Kleinrock and his team at the UCLA, created a network that would allow computers to speak to each other, and make them as easy to use as telephones. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were then concepts that were straight out of a science fiction novel set at least a hundred years in the future. Kleinrock, now 75, claims to be constantly surprised by the applications that have come into being along the way.

The Cold War can be thanked for the existence of the web. A constant battle of one-upmanship between the Russians and the Americans, led to the establishment of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the U.S., the agency that ultimately paid for the project that allowed the creation of a network that could link two computers over a distance. It was in 1983, that DARPA divided the existing network into two parts, the military component and what we know as the Internet. It was in the 1990's that the internet started resembling the cyberspace we are more familiar with, thanks to the opening up of the internet to business propositions and the wave of the World Wide Web. More on How does the World Wide Web Work.

But it has not been all smooth sailing. Spam, online fraud and Internet crimes have all become widespread providing detractors with fodder to attack the invention. While there is more freedom for the average Internet user to communicate, play or even work, there is also increased information control, due to authoritarian regimes and even increased security fears. After 40 years, maybe a midlife crisis has hit the Internet technology. But it is still responsible for a whole range of conceptions, that leave us dumbstruck on a daily basis.

So when you 'log in' today, just send out your wishes to the 40 year old Internet, that in Bill Gates' words is, "becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow."