Ignorance of Web History Widespread, Even as the Internet Turns Forty
Thursday, September 17th, 2009The 2nd of September this year marked the fortieth birthday of the internet. Though we overlook it today, there was a moment in the past when connectivity between two computers was something unheard of, forget about mobile broadband and data transfer. A giant and evolutionary leap in communications was taken on September 2 in 1969 when to computers were connected for the first time through a 15 feet cable at the
The journey started from there to develop into a university network, and on 29th October of the same year, the first communication between two geographically remote computers heralded yet another technological innovation in the history of the internet. For some, this is the real beginning of the internet, because it involved data being broken down into packets and accumulated at another end, which is precisely the method of all data transfer through the internet today.
In the year 1989, Tim Berners Lee coined the term “World Wide Web” to introduce the idea of a system of interconnected documents being accessed through the internet.
Today we spend a sizable portion of our waking lives on the internet searching for information, communicating with people, and entertaining ourselves. It is indeed hard to believe that in merely forty years, an intricate system like the internet could be developed from such uncomplicated roots.