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Internet Turns 35 Today
shadowspar writes "The CBC is reporting that the Internet turned 35 today. The story talks about the less-than-prophetic beginnings of the net: 'In order to log in to the two-computer network, which was then called ARPANET, programmers at UCLA were to type in 'log', and Stanford would reply 'in'.
The UCLA programmers only got as far as 'lo' before the Stanford machine crashed.'"
1968 was an important year in world history, no doubt about it. In 1998, there was a wave of documentaries, books and essays about that year. The authors focused on yippies trashing democratic convention in Chicago, Warsaw Pact invading Czechoslovakia, student uprising in Paris, Mexico massacre, flower-power, maoism, Vietnam war, Beatles recording white album or Che Guevara in Bolivia.
Almost nobody noticed that 1968 was also the year when Noyce an Moore founded Intel, Douglas Engelbart demoed for the fist time GUI, mouse and word processing, UCLA and Stanford started to build their networking connection. Even today, scholars seem not to notice the relevance of these facts.
Other useful charts are at http://navigators.com/stats.html
A map of global internet connectivity is http://navigators.com/globe16b.gifhere
The real question is - where does the Internet go from here?
I know you're joking, and I do appreciate the humor of Gore's choice of words.
However, it should be noted that Gore's words in a CNN interview, as quoted by Wired News, were as
follows:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the
initiative in creating the Internet."
Gore's meaning was fairly obvious: that he was one of the critical political supporters of the Internet. This is absolutely true. Without his support in the Congress, the Internet would have matured less quickly.
He never claimed to have "invented" anything. His efforts did help "create" the Internet though. And it is an accomplishment to be lauded...not mocked.
I wish people would stop misrepresenting this fact.