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

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."

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.

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....

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.