1. The Internet turns 40!
- Royston Olivera
The Internet turned 40 last week. Its been more than 2 yrs now that I have been a web
developer and that makes the Internet the source of my bread and butter. I have now
been a part of teams that have built some of the best websites on the net. But i would
like to make an confession here, untill today, I did not know how the Internet was born
and how it evolved over the years and am even sure 9 out 10 developers too wouldn’t
know even a bit of the history. So lets take a look on how the internet was born and how
it has come of age.
Birth and Naming…
The research and development of the Internet spanned over 10 years and hence no
exact date can be attributed to its birth, but the day October 29, 1969 stands as the first
2 nodes of what became ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of
Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International in Menlo Park, CA on this day.
Based on ARPA’s research packet switching network standards were developed in the
form of X.25 by ITU. Later on UUCPnet was developed with the idea of using
simple Bourne Shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line. TCP/IP
unified the different network standards and became an important communication
protocol for the internet. The term “internet” was coined in the first RFC published on the
TCP protocol in 1974(5 years later) as an abbrevation of the term “internetworking”. To
keep it simple “any network using TCP/IP was internet“.
The first steps…
The progress in the 1st 12 years were really slow with only 213 computers being
connected to the ARPANET network. From the mid 70’s to the mid 80’s Internet’s
technologies spread world wide and many new
applications(Email, telenet, compuserve etc.) were developed for it out of the interest of
many researchers in wide spread networking. Email became the most important and
highly looked up application as it reached 16m users in 1985. Although most of the basic
application that made the internet were developed, it was still used mostly by techies,
geeks in research labs and had not gained much public face.
Getting Young and Dynamic…
As the internet grew, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and
organize files which lead to projects like Gopher, WAIS, FTP archive list etc. but all these
fell short of full filling the scaling requirements. In 1989, Tim Berners Lee invented the
network based implementation of the hypertext concept via his project named World
Wide Web. With the advent of the WWW things started moving faster and till today there
has been no limit to the way the Internet is growing. With the arrival of web browsers
and not to forget the browser wars that still goes on we had 500m+ users online by
2001.
Fast Forwarding to Today…
Today the internet has over 1.7 billion users most of whom cannot think of life without
emails, social networking, chatting, gaming etc. Today it is more like a virtual but
required addition to the basic necessities list of food, clothing, shelter and education of
most developed countries. I cannot think of a day without access to the internet; if not
on the PC then from my mobile. The Internet has change the way people interact and
socialize, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. When
the web was born it was just about digitizing content; web2.0 was driven by socializing,
sharing content and has become the platform for the concept of linked data. Now

2. concepts like Real-Time Web and Internet of Things are driving us into the Web3.0
generation.
I doubt 40 years ago anyone would have imagined that the successful connection
between 2 nodes would go on to become one of the major and fastest growing
platforms in the field of technology. I would love to see how the internet evolves in the
next 40 years but wouldn’t dare to imagine coz whatever it may be, it will surely blow
our imagination from today’s standpoint.