Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views
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In October 1969, a student typed 'LO' on a computer - and the internet was born
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Towards the end of the summer of 1969
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a large grey metal box was delivered to the office of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
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At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message.
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It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is.
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It's interesting to compare how much has changed in computing and the internet since 1969 with, say, how much has changed in world politics.
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On the other hand, the breakthrough accomplished that night in 1969 was a decidedly down-to-earth one
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Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.
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on New Year's Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites.
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On the one hand, they were there because of the Russian Sputnik satellite launch, in 1957, which panicked the American defence establishment, prompting Eisenhower to channel millions of dollars into scientific research, and establishing Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to try to win the arms technology race. The idea was "that we would not get surprised again,"
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"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," they declared.
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The few outsiders who knew of the box's existence couldn't even get its name right: it was an IMP, or "interface message processor"
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It was already possible to link computers by telephone lines, but it was glacially slow, and every computer in the network had to be connected, by a dedicated line, to every other computer, which meant you couldn't connect more than a handful of machines without everything becoming monstrously complex and costly.
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The solution, called "packet switching" – which owed its existence to the work of a British physicist, Donald Davies – involved breaking data down into blocks that could be routed around any part of the network that happened to be free, before getting reassembled at the other end.
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Still, Kleinrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with his opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
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One of the most intriguing things about the growth of the internet is this: to a select group of technological thinkers, the surprise wasn't how quickly it spread across the world, remaking business, culture and politics – but that it took so long to get off the ground.
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In 1945, the American presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was already imagining the "memex", a device in which "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications", which would be linked to each other by "a mesh of associative trails", like weblinks.
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And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a "logic":
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Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.
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Deliberately or not, they helped encourage a vibrant culture of hobbyists on the fringes of academia – students and rank amateurs who built their own electronic bulletin-board systems and eventually FidoNet, a network to connect them to each other.
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n argument can be made that these unofficial tinkerings did as much to create the public internet as did the Arpanet. Well into the 90s, by the time the Arpanet had been replaced by NSFNet, a larger government-funded network,
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It was the hobbyists, making unofficial connections into the main system, who first opened the internet up to allcomers.
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This was the software known as TCP/IP, which made it possible for networks to connect to other networks, creating a "network of networks", capable of expanding virtually infinitely
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Nevertheless, by July 1992, an Essex-born businessman named Cliff Stanford had opened Demon Internet, Britain's first commercial internet service provider.
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After a year or so, Demon had between 2,000 and 3,000 users,
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the @ symbol was introduced in 1971, and the first message, according to the programmer who sent it, Ray Tomlinson, was "something like QWERTYUIOP".
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A couple of years later I got my first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power
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For most of us, though, the web is in effect synonymous with the internet, even if we grasp that in technical terms that's inaccurate: the web is simply a system that sits on top of the internet, making it greatly easier to navigate the information there, and to use it as a medium of sharing and communication.
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The first ever website was his own, at CERN: info.cern.ch.
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The idea that a network of computers might enable a specific new way of thinking about information, instead of just allowing people to access the data on each other's terminals, had been around for as long as the idea of the network itself: it's there in Vannevar Bush's memex, and Murray Leinster's logics.
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Web browsers crossed the border into mainstream use far more rapidly than had been the case with the internet itself: Mosaic launched in 1993 and Netscape followed soon after, though it was an embarrassingly long time before Microsoft realised the commercial necessity of getting involved at all. Amazon and eBay were online by 1995. And in 1998 came Google, offering a powerful new way to search the proliferating mass of information on the web.
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Google, and others, saw that the key to the web's future would be helping users exclude almost everything on any given topic, restricting search results to the most relevant pages.
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It is absurd – though also unavoidable here – to compact the whole of what happened from then onwards into a few sentences: the dotcom boom, the historically unprecedented dotcom bust, the growing "digital divide", and then the hugely significant flourishing, over the last seven years, of what became known as Web 2.0.
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The most confounding thing of all is that in a few years' time, all this stupendous change will probably seem like not very much change at all.
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Will you remember when the web was something you accessed primarily via a computer? Will you remember when there were places you couldn't get a wireless connection? Will you remember when "being on the web" was still a distinct concept, something that described only a part of your life, instead of permeating all of it? Will you remember Google?
