Happy 40th Birthday to the Internet
The internet as we know it today started began with ARPANET which was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Forty years ago on the evening of October 29, 1969 the first data travelled between two nodes of this new computer network. The idea of two computer talking to each other was quite cutting edge in that era. This video shows an interview with Charley Kline and Bill Duvall who were just two young programmers playing with tech back in the day!
Below: A map of the ARPANET eight years later in 1977. It’s shocking to me that you could map every point of the internet back in the 70s! If you look at the map at full size you’ll see the names of various locations like Harvard, NYU, the Pentagon, MIT, Xerox and Stanford.
Below: A physical record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET which took place at 10:30pm on October 29, 1969. This record from a logbook at UCLA describes setting up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer.
Below: The Sigma 7 mainframe computer that they used to send the message was huge!
