Happy 50th Birthday to the Internet
This evening marks the Internet's 50th birthday.
In the late 60s the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was working on a project to allow intercommunication between a dozen university computer systems for the purpose of interchange of data and research on AI. What they created was a packet switch network they called ARPANET.
The first successful message transmission was sent at 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (06:30 UTC 30.10.1969) from UCLA to Stanford. The receiving system crashed before the complete message was received but the first two letters of that message (the "lo" in "login") arrived intact. The Stanford geeks ferreted out the bug in the code that caused the crash and about an hour later the complete messages was transmitted successfully.
The first permanent ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, also between UCLA and Stanford. By 5 December 1969, Arpanet had grown to a whoopping four nodes in total.
The ARPANET was decomissioned in 1990 and the Internet (a term coined by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn) stood in its place.
Today about 4.5 billion earthlings regularly use the Internet and it carries 2.5 exaBytes (2.5 million teraBytes or 2.5 trillion megaBytes or 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes) of data daily. In its first live test, APRPANET choked on just five Bytes of data.
In 1972, APRA got DoD-eified and became DARPA. Then in 1993 it went back to being APRA but only for three years. They still dabble in Internet stuff (they created The Onion Router network, which is the backbone of the TOR anonymous browser) but they mostly work on stuff with military applications, like Stealth technology, a telescopic sight that never misses and the self-steering bullet.
