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.'"

Comments

Man

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd swear it only looked 29!

Which?

[datGSguy]

Which Internet?

21

[happyfrogcow]

I think that means Al Gore was only 21 when he invented it

Re:21

[Alric]

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.

Before the Stanford machine crashed...

[Anonymous Coward]

MS must have a time machine.

35 years

[thedogcow]

and what a wonderful 35 years of porn collecting it was.

Re:35 years

[Anonymous Coward]

...especially considering that the for the first 20 years the porn was entirely text-based.

The unfortunate side of the internet

[Sneftel]

From the article:

Kleinrock said he predicted in 1969 that the small network would eventually expand across the globe, making a vast amount of information accessible at any time from anywhere in the world.

"The part I missed... was that my 97-year-old mother would be on the internet today," he said.

"...and man, do I ever wish those pictures hadn't gotten onto the 'net."

Re:The unfortunate side of the internet

[null etc.]

Kleinrock said he predicted in 1969 that the small network would eventually expand across the globe, making a vast amount of information accessible at any time from anywhere in the world.

The prediction was so close!

Modified for correctness:

Kleinrock said he predicted in 1969 that the small network would eventually expand across the globe, making a vast amount of junk email accessible at any time from anywhere in the world.

Re:The unfortunate side of the internet

[pchan-]

those of you that are at UCLA can go to the engineering library (Boelter Hall, 4th? floor) and see the IMP (interface message processor). it's a green refrigerator-sized metal box with some switches on the front. it was the first node (along with the stanford machine) on what is now the internet.

35 years on

[BillsPetMonkey]

and you can go and meet many of the original programmers, now working in home improvement stores up and down the land!

Thousands of twisty websites

[Alien54]

all alike.

or like galaxies in the night sky, separated by vast expanses of emptines and porn

Re:Thousands of twisty websites

[spuzzzzzzz]

It is dark and you are likely to click on a virus-installing link.

What they meant to type...

[ajlitt]

...wasn't "log". It was "lol!!1! did u get my msg??"

35?

[daeley]

Damn, that's old. I think it's about time for the Internet to packet in.

Ahem.

Internet Years Vs. Real years

[Suburbanpride]

I remember on the old PBS Triumph of the Nerds documentry, they said that internet years are like dogs years, since everything changes so fast. I've been online since 1994 (mosiac and trumpet winsock), and the internet of today is very different from 10 years ago, although it still used HTTP.

I'm not even sure its safe to called the ARPANET the internet, considering how limited it was, but it will make for some interesting debate.

Re:Internet Years Vs. Real years

[pixel.jonah]

PLEASE Remember:

Internet > WWW

Thank you.

**cough**I-tunes**cough

[Tracer_Bullet82]

I would have modded you troll, if I had mod points.

So...

[Ryan Stortz]

So....does this mean that after they tried again, the first 3 letters the grace the internet were lol.

(Lo [crash] Log)

It's a scary thought....

Famous internet prediction by me in 1994

[Ars-Fartsica]

In a 4th year networking class paper:

"The Web will likely be a novelty while serious research will remain on Gopher."

AOL

[frankmu]

I thought AOL (internet) was alot younger than that.

it's amazing that their current ad campaign makes AOL=Internet

So Al Gore

[kensai]

was only like 10 when he invented the Internet. The man's a freakin genius ;)

1968

[Trurl's Machine]

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.

Re:1968

[frank_adrian314159]

Even today, scholars seem not to notice the relevance of these facts.

Because today, the 60's culture of experimentation (in expansion of rights, in lifestyles, and, yes, in chemical ingestion) is decried as nothing but selfish hedonism without actually examining that it might have also been the roots of a culture that allowed technical advances to expand and flourish. Of course, in this dangerous world, we could never let anything like that happen again!

Re:a graph of internet growth?

[aacool]

THe growth of the Internet is http://www.icdri.org/technology/indexbp.htm#d1 here

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?

Sure it was

[abb3w]

I'm not even sure its safe to called the ARPANET the internet, considering how limited it was

FTP is quite old, and was quite useful even before gopher and later http made zipping files back and forth trivial. The genius of Berners-Lee was rather like the mythical invention of the Recees Peanut Butter Cup. He figured out a way to combine a hypertext markup scheme with internet file transfer. The individual component ideas had been lying around for at least seven years (and possibly since the dawn of ARPANET) when he put them together in a limited whole. Active scripting was a bit more clever an idea, but only marginally.

I will grant that it's a good thing TELNET is dying in favor of SSH-- security (network and computer alike) has made great progress since then. So has bandwidth. So has accessibility to the general public. But it's no more funamentally different in terms of power than modern desktop computers are compared to those of days of yore.

So that's why...

[The-Bus]

No wonder. I was heading to lunch today and I drove past Matt Sauper's Chevrolet, and there was the Internet with that new blonde girlfriend of it. I hear she's only in college. As I was parking at the sandwich place, there they went, speeding by me. The Internet apparently bought a solid gold Corvette convertible. At least I thought it was him: the license plate said HTTPIMP.

Now tell Joe Beer this.

[JessLeah]

Joe Beer thinks "the Internet" is around ten years old, since that's when he first heard of it. Smarter Joe-Beers would point to the date of the invention of the Web (not "the Internet" as a whole) and say "See? The Internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 199x... I read it on such-and-such"...

[cue OT rant]

Most bozos nowadays can't distinguish between:

* "The Internet" and "The Web"
* "PC" and "Windows"
* "Microsoft" and "Windows"
* "Macintosh" and "the Mac OS" (or "Mac OS X")
* "Apple" and "Macintosh"


Thus, you will hear things like "Yeah, I'm on the Web" (translation: "I have a connection to the Internet"), or "Are you running Windows or Mac?" (translation: "Windows or Mac OS X"), or "This game is only available for the PC" (read: "...for Windows").

However, these same functional computer illiterates (read: 99% of the US population) manage to think that "Linux", "Unix", "Red Hat" and "Solaris" (to give four examples) are completely different skillsets (talk to any typical "tech recruiter" and you'll see what I mean. I've met guys who have twenty years of experience in half a dozen commercial Unices, but can't get a job dealing with the one major flavor they've never touched... 'cuz as we all know, they don't all share 99% of the same stuff.... Oh, wait, they do...)

Is seems like...

[mbrewthx]

Only yesterday The Internet hosted it's firt pRon site...

Re:unintended consequences

[soliptic]

First, let me say I agree with your key point (unintended consequences) absolutely. It's one of the things that fascinates me most about the internet. What strikes me very clearly is how undeniably Marxist the whole thing is. Now, I know most people tend towards ill-informed knee-jerks at the mention of Marx, but try and forget all that silly Soviet nonsense, which really had precious little to do with Marx at all, and essentially nothing to do with the Marx I'm talking about.

In short (because I should be in bed already):

Changes in the means of production (ie. technological advances, eg. the internet) will alter the relations of production and eventually have a "cascade effect" which radically alters society itself (eg. notions of intellectual property).

But, that's not really what I wanted to pick up. Rather, I'm curious as to how a music distribution that "no one" can make money off can possibly be considered "infinitely superior".

I'm not trying to troll, I dont think P2P is theft, blah blah. Hell, I use P2P myself - yes, to download music. Yes, to download music which I'm not supposed to.

On the other hand, as a musician, there has to be money in there somewhere, or the consequences are potentially dire. Now you can say "real musicians will continue to make music for the love of it, even if they're not getting paid" all you like. You'd be right. They will.

But.... lets just say, I spent five years making music while a student/unemployed. In that time I consistently averaged one track every two weeks. Eleven months ago I got a full-time temping job; since then I've made five tracks in total. Three months ago I got a full-time "proper" job; since then I've made absolutely nothing.

It's simply a matter of time and energy. If you can earn money from your music, you can devote all your time to it. If you can't, you're faced with trying to come up with some meaningful in two or three snatched hours after work, with a head full of stress and that 7am alarm clock lurking at the back of your mind.

If nobody makes money from music, less music gets made. Sad but true.

Re:Famous internet prediction by me in 1989

[RealProgrammer]

In 1989 the Internet (all text : mail, telnet, ftp, news, etc) was growing at something like 8% per month. A coworker predicted that in 10 years everyone's toaster would be networked.

I said, "No, only geeks will ever use the Internet."

I realized how wrong that was when I saw my first URL on a billboard in about '95. I felt violated. They were taking over my network!

"Maybe if TCP/IP were less formal...

[jcuervo]

it'd be 'YO!/SUP?' instead" - Thinkgeek

Seems fitting, though.

192.168.1.2: 'Lo.
192.168.1.1: Hey.
192.168.1.2: 'n I get a shell?
192.168.1.1: Sure.