The Internet's Birthday

For all the changes it has brought to our society, the Internet is actually pretty young. Have you ever wondered when and how the Internet was born? I'm Jeanna Matthews and this is Common Sense Computing.

There are many milestones that could be considered the "birth" of the Internet. Perhaps May 31, 1961 when MIT graduate student Leonard Kleinrock published the first paper on packet-switching, a novel approach to global networks much different than the circuit-switched telephone network. Perhaps September 2, 1969 when the first of the four original Internet nodes was connected at UCLA.

However the Internet birthday, we'd like to celebrate today is October 29, 1969 when the first packets were sent over the new Internet. Charley Kline from UCLA attempted to logon to another Internet node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He entered the word "logon" - L, O, - and then the system crashed on G!

Despite this inauspicious beginning, the number of hosts on the Internet grew from 4 in 1969 to 231 in 1981 to 130,000 in 1989 to 72 million in 2000 to over 300 million today. Imagine what would happen if the number of cars on the streets of your town had grown from 213 in 1981 to over 72 million in less than 20 years!

Amazingly, the basic network principles built into the Internet have carried it from a small research test bed, to an academic network managed by the U.S. government, to a privatized global resource. Even if it did crash on the "G".

For more information about Internet History, visit us on the web at www.commonsensecomputing.org. For Common Sense Computing, this is Jeanna Matthews.

Hobbes' Internet Timeline: http://www.zakon.org/robert/timeline/

ISC Internet Domain Survey: http://www.isc.org/ops/ds