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.'"

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.

a graph of internet growth?

[opencity]

How did the internet grow in the early days? A bar chart of connectivity by year would be interesting.

Stop and think...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you werent using the internet, what would you actually do on your computer? Here's to another 35 years "learning experiences".

Hmm..I think a more significant question is..

[Tracer_Bullet82]

without Internet, will computer adaptation be as widespread as it is?

But personally, i'd be killing some worms or killing some kittens, if you get my drift.

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.

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!

WRONG!

[Madwand]

The Internet turned 21 on January 1, 2004. The Internet was born on January 1, 1983 when the ARPANET converted from NCP to TCP/IP. The ARPANET was Network 10. The ARPANET is dead. Long live the ARPANET!

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!

Re:1968

[DerekLyons]

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.

No need to examine it beyond the most cursory. One finds the hotbeds of psychedelic activity and the hotbeds of technical activity and finds them rather well seperated in space, and slightly seperated in time. Additionally, that "60's culture" was a subculture, not mainstream. Kinda like the 'ghetto gangsta'/rap culture, the number of media created wannabe's far exceeds the size of the parent 'culture'. (Ditto Disco culture, and the wavers/punks of the intervening decades.)

The first Bit to travel over ARPANET?

[j.leidner]

So was the first ever bit to travel over the Net a 0 or a 1??

Assuming that the Honeywell-based IMP was a using a 7-bit ASCII-like encoding without checksum bit and transferred bit sequentially from most to least significant bit, then the first sequence was 1001100. But I guess it was perhaps rather based on a five-bit teletype scheme.

There wasn't much info on the DDP-516's homepage about that. But I like this quote: "The Honeywell DDP-516 was chosen for its high clock speed (aprox. 1.1 MHz) and expandability"

Birth of the Internet [ucla.edu]

Honeywell Series 16 [old-computers.com]

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