Happy 40th Birthday, Internet!
The Web At 40: Online World Stills Surprises 'Net Pioneer

Here is what happened: The first network had four nodes, the first at UCLA, and the second at Stanford Research Institute. The other two--at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were not yet installed.

That network was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a program of the U.S. Department of Defense, created in the aftermath of the Soviets beating the U.S. into space.

On October 29, 1969, a graduate student named Charley Kline used a terminal at UCLA to contact SRI. When Kline typed the "G" in "login" the network crashed. And for some reason, we are today marking that as the "birth of the Internet."

Who says geeks don't have a sense of humor?

Fortunately, the connection was made on a later attempt and if you forget the crash, the proto-Internet was born. You can see the log of the test at the Computer History Museum's Internet timeline.

If the Internet does not seem like it can actually be 40-years-old today, that is because it is not. Sure, there was the proto-Internet, called ARPANET, in those early years. Nevertheless, for many of us, the modern Internet began in 1990 or later.

By then, many of us were experts at using CompuServe, The Source, America Online, and other dial-up services. Some of us had our own computer bulletin board systems, too.

However, the Internet was different. Where the earlier services were destinations, the Internet was, yes, "an information superhighway" that could connect all these services together, eventually bringing hundreds of millions of users and destinations online.

The reason I chose 1990 is because that was the year when you could buy a dial-up Internet connection for the first time and it was also when the first World Wide Web server came online.

It is also the year the first machine to be remotely controlled over the Internet appeared at Dan Lynch's Interop conference. It was the "Internet Toaster," created by the great John Romkey, who was kind enough to share a piece of toast with me. It was an exciting time.

While each development led to others, Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web is what made the modern Internet possible. That and e-mail that could move from one service to another, thus becoming capable of connecting everyone.