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Happy Birthday, Internet!
NobodyExpects writes "I'd like to wish a happy birthday to the Internet! Today marks its 40th birthday!
In fall 1969, computers sending data between two California universities set the stage for the Internet, which became a household word in the 1990s. On September 2nd 1969, in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, two computers passed test data through a 15-foot gray cable. Stanford Research Institute joined the fledgling ARPANET network a month later; UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah joined by years end, and the internet was born."
Before everyone starts posting stories about how they grew up on their Apple II using a 300 baud modem, let's have a forward looking discussion.
The Internet as we define it today was born 40 years ago when two big computers were hooked up with a cable and exchanged data. Let me ask: what are the milestones that will matter 10, 30 years from now? Some guesses (pick your favorites):
- wires, what wires?: The Internet goes wireless, with the invention of Wifi (circa 1991 - yes, really that old)
- device, what device?: The Internet goes ubiquitous, we don't even have to carry those bulky iPhones around (circa ???)
- telepresence: I see you, you see me, in HD, anytime, wherever you and I are. Maybe we can even shake hands. Definitely coming in the next decade.
- oracle: all knowledge, all questions, answered all the time (that might change the way we think of our education system!)
Who said innovation is slowing down? We are still in the stone age of the Internet.
That's an extremely thick cable...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I hear the internet wants a pony.
thx for the porn
Apparently Al Gore had his first child at the age of 21 ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
With the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses coming in a couple of years, combined with extremly low IPv6 deployment, the Internet expansion will grind to a halt very soon. You can use NAT for the clients, but the servers still need real IP addresses.
When did that transition happen? Late 70s?
I've been using the net since 1987 (shortly after Star Trek TNG premiered). It's been a fun ride going from 1.2k bit/s and pure text. There were a few graphical bulletin board services added in 1989, but they were little more than vector-based graphics and took several minutes to load! None of them had music or video like we have today.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
the first spam e-mail was sent.
With the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses coming in a couple of years, combined with extremly low IPv6 deployment, the Internet expansion will grind to a halt very soon.
Imminent death of Internet predicted. Film at eleven.
= = = =
And for those of you who weren't on it back then: This was a running gag on netnews virtually from its initial deployment. Seems like every week there was a new prediction of some mechanism by which the rapidly-doubling internet would break - yet it still kept going.
As someone who works as an engineer in a big-name company that builds Internet infrastructure boxes: I can tell you that "able to do IPV6 when we get around to turning it on" is one of the major checkboxes for new equipment purchases.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
See the Wikipedia packet radio article as a starting point. There was packet radio using Internet protocols back in the 1970s. The protocol that became "Wifi" was first deployed in 1991, but it was far from the first usable packet radio protocol.
watched over by the Elders of the Internet
Loose lips lose spit.
I've seen similar birthday plans scheduled for October 29th (first hard link) or even December. It's one of those unknowable things, but an entertaining article nevertheless.
Does spamming Slashdot really work? Are you a millionaire yet?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Cake? We want cake! (and ice cream too)
Happy 40th Birthday you series of tubes we now know as the internet, the interweb, cyberspace.
PPN
From the article: VOICEOVER (English) no name given: "In the 70s, the silicone chip became the basis of a new generation of computerized devices .
Following the silicone chip, came games and e-mail, creating a social and industrial revolution.
Wow, I want a computer with one of those silicone chips, mine only has a silicon chip.
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
in human years?
And this is believed to be the 1st image on the internet. It was of the parody doo-wop girl band Les Horribles Cernettes from CERN.
http://www.object404.com
And on a personal note, I was just starting college. What a great time to have a life-long interest in computers.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, if it was born in '69 then the internet is definitely can be classified as a member of Generation X. Gen Y, go find your own network. Oh, and get off my lawn.
Let's sing all along!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo
(There are too many funny comments. I can't decide, so I'll let you do it. ^^)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If I remember correctly, September 2, 1969 was still summer, not fall. :-)
I love you. Really, I do.
I hear there's rumors on the Internets that there is no birthday party.
Ok, now that I have my flamebait out of the way. Looking forward to what will be the next milestones.
:)
1) Speed, the hunger for data transfer will definitely keep increasing so backbone upgrades to support 100Gbit and 1Tbit speeds will be coming. On what medium, that is a good question of which I believe fiber's potential has not been even remotely reached yet.
2) Input method to computers, I think this method will stay with the keyboard for sometime but like all input methodologies, it will eventually get improved upon. Currently we are limited to the speed of our fingers which is nowhere near the speed of our brains, so bridging this gap I feel will be a major overhaul at some point in time, say 20 or 30 years? (Hopefully before I die, I would love to see it ) Anyone remember the scene in Star Trek IV where Scotty talks into the mouse thinking its a mic? LOL
Maybe something along the lines of Minority Report would be the next step combined with voice
3) Identification technology as well. There are already companies that are working towards doing face recognition as you walk by to tailor ad's to you on their monitor as you walk by. One example here (http://www.designer-daily.com/billboards-are-watching-you-2566)
4) And definitely wireless communication tied in with wireless power. There is already the project set in motion to put solar panels in orbit to beam power back to earth as well at wireless power through resonant coupling continuing to be researched. I think the combinations will help us eventually spreading our wings from this planet and enable the transmission of data from deeper and deeper parts of space to take place. Maybe playing MMORG's from the moon will be possible in the near future
because it is the culmination of all the good things that happened to mankind.
now it brings people together, regardless of location, time, situation, condition, race, gender, nation, age, occupation, social status, from all over the world. even if their governments or rulers do not want that.
children around the world growing up together playing same games, growing up in the flourishing new internet culture. when they are grown up, all of them will have much more in common than previous generations. this will remove many barriers and estrangements in between the nations.
internet is very important.
Read radical news here
He never claimed that. It was just political games and a clumsy choice of words.
Yes, that grated on my ears too. National Geographic should present a higher standard of accuracy than this article, full of stock footage (the chip being wired etc.). And the businessman saying the Osborne 1 was the first portable computer. Maybe for him, but the IBM 5100 pre-dated this by a number of years.
Yes, yes... the internet is the culmination of all of human innovation and knowledge... Very uplifting until you remember that the internet brought us 4Chan and LOL cats.
Says a lot about humans, no?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
...before I got my first ten-strand abacus.
September 2nd = Summer
That was the birth of the Internet. When 2 computers first talked to each other using a packet switching connection.
growing up in the flourishing new internet culture
No offence but that's partially bullshit. I don't even know anyone in France who's ever heard of LOLcats. It only works for everybody who speaks English, but in many countries where they're not very good at English like Spain, France or Italy they tend to be more closed to what the Internet has to offer, culturally.
Also I'd like to enjoy the use of the culmination of mankind and the best thing we've ever done to insult your intelligence by telling you, you're a dumbass. If there's something the best thing we've ever done is good for, it's calling people overseas we've never seen before dumbasses, in real time.
You just got troll'd!
Too bad I spent most of your birthday sleeping and fapping to loli.
Not that any of you insensitive jerks remembered.
The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
> oracle: all knowledge, all questions, answered all the time
> (that might change the way we think of our education system!)
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
> The internet's had an Oracle since 1975.
>
> ZOT!!! You owe the Oracle six woodchucks and a trowel.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo
It's fairly seriously true. The industry apparently FreeBSD's biggest initial users, among other things. They also, from what I've read, are early adopters of just about any new kind of storage media that comes out, as well.
So 40 years ago two computers passed data on a 15 foot cable, right...?
Now, maybe they used early internet protocols to do it, but is this really an internet? Wouldn't it be an intranet, or a LAN?
The "one month later" when some remote systems were added onto the network, that sounds to me like the birth of the internet...
Bow-ties are cool.
>>>little more than vector-based graphics
Ooops I forgot. There was the Q-Link graphical service, which eventually evolved into America Online. Its drawback was that it only worked with Commodore's CASCII set, not IBMs or Apples or Ataris. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
The other drawback to the service was that if you wanted to do anything interesting at all on it, you had to pay per-minute "plus time" charges - which could be spent waiting for your floppy drive to load data or waiting for your modem to get information from the server...
Bow-ties are cool.
I'm having doubts too, after seeing this yesterday at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lk/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html. It's a scan of Leonard Kleinrock's lab notebook of this event, which is dated Oct. 29th, and it seems they didn't get the whole message across without crashing until Oct. 30th. He's still at UCLA, it happened in his lab, and this is his university web site.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
Here is the scan of Kleinrock's notes from that day, which was October 29th (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "early October"): http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lk/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html. It was October 30th before they got it to work without crashing (nothing's ever easy). Kleinrock is still alive and still at UCLA, and these scans are on his own university web site, so that seems pretty authoritative to me.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
But can you really rely on snopes.com for the true answer?
BFD
You're right. He basically didn't do squat, except act as a mediocre project manager who likes to say redundant humdingers like "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives" that any non-progressive would be lampooned for uttering.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Actually Gore was 'one of us' in the truest sense. He was a geek:
Gore was one of the Atari Democrats who were given this name due to their "passion for technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the "greenhouse effect."[25] On March 19, 1979 he became the first member of Congress to appear on C-SPAN.[45] During this time, Gore co-chaired the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, along with Newt Gingrich.[46] In addition, he has been described as having been a "genuine nerd, with a geek reputation running back to his days as a futurist Atari Democrat in the House. Before computers were comprehensible, let alone sexy, the poker-faced Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber-optic networks to sleepy colleagues."[25][47] Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that, "as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises."
The Internet is actually a couple years older than 40, but we don't know it yet because the original network has a ping time of 50 years.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Happy Birthday (mine was Sept 1st, 1969)
I've always thought it was September 1st: IMP#1 at UCLA was turned on that day, IMP#2 at Stanford didn't get turned on until October 1st. But I always celebrate September 1st, 1969 because it happens to be the same day I was born.
no really, birthday of the internet and the first thing I thought of ...
happy birthday card with goatse on the cover and tubgirl on the inside.
also maybe with the peter pan dude on the back.
so .... soooooooo many things I can't unsee.
In 1969 - the internet was born
in 1972 - i was born
somewhere between those two time periods, ePorn was being conceived. Man I love the internet.
I will admit to the fact that it was Al Gore that first proposed and actually set up the e-mail accounts for himself and Bill Clinton (president@whitehouse.gov), not to mention he was instrumental in getting the first White House web server up and going with official government documents. This was several years before even congress got their act together or the Pentagon (the top command, not necessarily elements of the D.O.D.)
As for his role in setting up NSF-net, I will also acknowledge his role in getting the legislation written to approve that network and getting the votes necessary for ratification of that bill. That doesn't imply that he "invented" the internet, but he was a contributing factor to its development in a significant manner. He at least was aware of computer technology and not afraid to use it.
(K . . . does anyone else find this description creepy . . . !)
(http://www.psychicguild.com/horoscopes_zodiac.php?sign=Virgo)
Virgos are often put down badly by many astrologers and written up as being fussy and narrow-minded. But when a Virgo shines, there is practically no sign to match their inner light. An in-tune Virgo is a treat to meet. When a Virgo is confident within themselves they are the most successful, structured and creative of all the signs.
Many Virgos can be found working in the "service to others" industries, ranging from welfare work, doctors, school-teachers through to practising natural forms of healing like massage, herbal remedies etc. One of the most magical characteristics of the Virgo is no matter how many times life or romance turns sour on them, they still manage to maintain faith in others, refusing to become cynical. There is ingenuity around this sign, a kind-heartedness, which unfortunately is sometimes played upon by others for their advantage. Virgos can often become victims of relationship power-games, where they are mistreated.
Creative and sensitive, Virgos are delicate people who, like rare and special orchids, require individual treatment to fully blossom into their true unique beauty. Shy, they are happy to allow others to take centre-stage and often generate their time and energy into making those they love happy or successful.
Virgos are givers and when the chips are down and you need a friend, the one available during those testing times when you need advice or companionship the most, is likely to be a Virgo. Virgos understand human frailties better than most, because they are so deep and reflective themselves. With a Virgo in your life you have someone who understands and cares and any romance or friendship based upon these qualities is certain to be mutually rewarding
That was the moment of conception; the birth took a little longer.
The internet as we know it was born when Jack Rickard and his army of sysops burned the AUP, tore what was an exclusionary research and education network from the cold dead fingers of its institutional guardians, and made it available to anyone with a computer and a modem. That would have been around 1990 when it was all made possible by UUNet's introduction of AlterNet.
It's interesting to note how many of the people celebrated as internet heroes fought the commercialization of the net, the internet as we know it today, tooth and nail.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Like CB radio.
"The Engelbart Hypothesis: dialogs with Douglas Engelbart" This new book documents the framework that drove that laid the foundation for most of the innovations of the personal computing revolution. http://engelbartbook.com