Internet turns 40
 

Happy Birthday to the Interrnet - Born 29 Oct 1969.

Internet turns 40
AP, 28 Oct 2009

Technology stars, pundits, and entrepreneurs joined the Internet's father on Thursday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his culture-changing child.

"It's the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke," said University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969.

Kleinrock led an anniversary event that blended reminiscence of the Internet's past with debate about its future.

"There is going to be an ongoing controversy about where we have been and where we are going," said Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the popular news and blog website that bears her name.

"It is not just about the Internet; it is about our times. We are going to need desperately to tap into the better angels of our nature and make our lives not just about ourselves but about our communities and our world."

Huffington was on hand to discuss the power the Internet gives to grass roots organizers on a panel with Kleinrock and Social Brain Foundation director Isaac Mao.

"The Internet is a democratizing element; everyone has an equivalent voice," Kleinrock said. "There is no way back at this point. We can't turn it off. The Internet Age is here."

Leonard Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube that day 40 years ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the Internet.

"The net is penetrating every aspect of our lives," Kleinrock said to a room of about 200 people and an equal number watching online.

"As a teenager the Internet is behaving badly, the dark side has emerged. The question is when it grows into a young adult will it get over this period of misbehaving?"

Kleinrock referred to spam emails, online scams and malicious software spread by crooks as an unexpected dark side of the Internet.

On October 29, 1969 Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to "talk" to one at a research institute. **

**SRI International in Menlo Park, CA

Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.

US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military.

A key to getting computers to exchange data was breaking digitized information into packets fired between on-demand with no wasting of time, according to Kleinrock.

Engineers began typing "LOG" to log into the distant computer, which crashed after getting the "O."

"So, the first message was 'Lo' as in 'Lo and behold'," Kleinrock recounted. "We couldn't have a better, more succinct first message."

Kleinrock's team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on the ARPANET. Computers at two other US universities were added to the network by the end of that year.

Funding came from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established in 1958 in response to the launch of a Sputnik space flight by what was then the Soviet Union.

US leaders were in a technology race with Cold War rival Russia.

The National Science Foundation added a series of super computers to the network in the late 1980s, opening the online community to more scientists.

The Internet caught the public's attention in the form of email systems in workplaces and ignited a "dot-com" industry boom that went bust at the turn of the century.

Kleinrock, 75, sees the Internet spreading into everything.

"The next step is to move it into the real world," Kleinrock said. "The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there. It will talk back to me."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usitinte...storykleinrock

Professor Kleinrock didn't even thank former VP Gore for inventing it!

Oh wait, it's in there:

"The Internet is a democratizing element..." :D

This can't be accurate at all.

Al Gore would have only been 21 then. :D


Bandy

Since when has al gore ever been accurate?

RF 1

When ordered to aim for the head....

They were wise not to give him a mag.......a shame:D.

Perhaps his CO learned from Sheriff Andy Taylor.

RF 1

Nobody said the chamber was empty... ;)

I heard he carried one round in his shirt pocket on the advice of his mentor. :D

Richard

RF,

Good grief. He's been accurate on lots of things:

1) Inventing the internet
2) Global warming
3) Winning the 2000 election
4) The Lockbox Theory

I could go on, but the man's greatness is evident. If you don't believe that, just ask him.


Bandy

Too bad he never used it. Save us all a lot of grief. :D

Historians will see this stuff and assume that he really did invent something. :munchin :p

Wonder what else they'll believe to be true that really wasn't?


Bandy

Al Gore and the Information Superhighway®
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Mary Bellis
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." - Al Gore


In 1969, at the age of 21, Al Gore first built a working prototype for his Internet invention. Gore, then a law student at Vanderbilt University, came up with his idea from the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film, "Dr Strangelove". The movie portrayed a nuclear holocaust in which a new network had to survive. As is the case with many great inventions, the Department of Defense (DOD) saw the same movie. In 1965, the DOD's Advanced Research Project Association (ARPA) began work on ARPANET, intended to promote the sharing of supercomputers amongst researchers in the United States. I have to point out here that the DOD did this a year after the movie came out while Al Gore was first in line at the box office and saw the film three times.

Al Gore would call the ARPA researchers and discuss his progress on the invention of the Internet. "Supercomputers are the steam locomotives of the information age," Gore would tell the researchers, "In the Industrial Age, steam locomotives didn't do much good until the railroad tracks were laid down across the nation. Similarly, we now have supercomputers... but we don't have the interstate highways that we need to connect them."

That was all the technical support the ARPA researchers needed to hear. By 1969, ARPANET was first demonstrated. The researchers at four US campuses brought the first hosts of the ARPANET online, connecting Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. I think that was very clever of Al Gore to get the government to build a prototype of the Internet for him and have the taxpayers pay for the young inventor's start-up expenses.

Currently Al Gore has taken the lead in "Reinventing Government" to make it cost less and work better. He now heads the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. This time Al don't forget to file a patent, and when can we expect to see a working prototype?

Editors note: Jimmy Carter invented nuclear power and I forget what Ronald Reagan invented. Information Superhighway® is the registered trademark of Al Gore's Internet.

April Fools

"Yeah, and I invented the spellchecker" - fellow inventor Dan Quayle on hearing that Al Gore invented the Internet.


http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa040100a.htm

Bandy, you're clearly not remembering items #5 and #6 on Vice President Gore's list of Great Inventions: the TARDIS, and the Neuralizer. The former he used to travel back in time to create the Internet before he thought of it and the latter he used to make everyone forget items #5 and #6. But not item #7--Yes, they will. They will assume (and prove) that he invented his own defeat in the 2000 presidential election by:

(a) trying to re-invent himself as a populist during his acceptance speech at the 2000 DNC,
(b) not letting the most popular Democrat of the decade campaign on his behalf,
(c) and assailing the Second Amendment in states Democrats had carried in 1996.

IMO, it will be then what it is now--

• that in the late nineteenth century the United States practiced deliberately imperialism;
• that African American political activity was not a central cause of the Civil War;
• that the Vietnam War was the most unpopular conflict in American history;
• that the "new" history of the 1960s and 1970s was "new";
• and that history has "lessons" that can be applied to contemporaneous policy debates.

So now that the internet is 40, does that mean its best days are gone everything is downhill from here?

The internet will wake up one day with random unexplainable pains, it will do the smart thing and schedule a prostate exam, and it will swear to lose that last 20lbs.

:D :p