Today is the Fortieth Birthday of the Internet
At least that’s one version of history.
This afternoon NPR’s All Things Considered featured a story on the first communication via the ARPANET. On October 29, 1969, a programmer at a UCLA computer lab sent a two-letter message to a techie in a computer lab at Stanford Research Institute. It was the first two letters of the word, ‘login.’ When he hit the ‘g,’ the computer crashed. An hour later, so the story goes, l-o-g-i-n was successfully transmitted.
That ought to be worth a celebration – or at least a moment of recognition.
I recommend the 6 minute 38 second report. It’s worth a listen just to gain a perspective on how far this communications revolution has come.
(The image is from Wikimedia Commons.)
Update, October 30, 2009: While we’re celebrating the technology that made blogging – and the whole familiar world wide web – possible, here is the link to an article I ran across some time ago by Chris Andersen, ‘Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity,’ which reviews technological changes over the past 40 years.
