Family Life

09.02.09 | FL News Team

The Internet just turned 40. It was 40 years ago today when two gigantic computers traded meaningless information for the U.S. Department of Defense at the University of California - Los Angeles. That simple exchange of a network called "Arpanet" spawned a worldwide revolution called the Internet. The creation was the start of blurred national boundaries and a planet's people communicating with each other with just a click. At the time no one could have dreamed of Google, YouTube and Facebook and the impact the Internet would have on everyone.

Weeks after Arpanet's first connection, another was made between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. The first entry was not successful. The system crashed after the phrase "logon" was transmitted. In 1972 Ray Tomlinson introduced e-mail to the network and is credited for the now well known "@" sign. Eleven years later the suffixes dot-com, dot-gov and dot-edu were incorporated. In 1989 Quantum Computer Services, which came to be known as AOL, began online service for Macintosh and Apple Two computers. The real revolution occurred in the late 1980s when British physicist Tim Berners-Lee thought up the Web as a way for people to connect and exchange information. In 1994 the Web browser Netscape was started.

Last February, Netcraft, an Internet monitoring firm, reported that there are now 215-million websites. That's compared to 18-thousand sites in 1995. While the Internet has become a household word, concerns with its unfettered and often incorrect information and racy content continue. Also, there are questions of whether the Internet will kill print medium altogether. But one thing is for sure. In ten years, when the world celebrates the Net's golden jubilee, there will be some people who will still believe Al Gore created the Internet.