The Internet is everywhere these days, being accessed on phones and tablets, tied into our cameras and our TV’s. Wi-Fi is accessible from everywhere these days, from city buses to your neighborhood McDonald’s, and the world grows smaller every day as a result. Internet Day is a celebration of this culmination of computing and communication technology, and they way it has brought all our lives together.
The first letters ever transmitted across the prodigal internet, which consisted of two computers, were “L” and “O”. This was as far as they got before the ‘Net crashed, and they had to reboot to get things in running order. We’ve been resetting our routers ever since, just to keep our beloved lifeline running ever since.
History of Internet Day
Internet Day celebrates the origin of the very first internet transmission ever sent, and from it the utterly world-changing series of events that followed. People are able to video conference from around the world, and the information is stored and transmitted at unbelievable rates between computers and friends and family. Enhanced Reality is becoming a reality, with Digital Overlays available for real world things, seamlessly combining the world of the internet with the one we walk around in every day.
Let’s go back to where it all started. The Internet, defined as a remote connection between two computers, was first achieved on October 29, 1969 (just a few months after Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon). In the glow of a green monochrome screen deep in the bowels of the computer science department at UCLA, a young graduate student picked up his phone and called the computer lab at Stanford. He is preparing to send the first message over an Internet connection. The men on either end of the phone are Charley Kline and Bill Duvall.
While not as famous as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren, Leonard Kleinrock, Charley Kline and Bill Duvall were the key players in the first Internet connection. Working on the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a network funded by the US Defense Department that connected four independent terminals installed at ULCA, Stanford, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, Charley Kline attempted to send login information from UCLA to Bill Duvall at Stanford.
The internet is already slightly extra-terrestrial, with video and communication available to the astronauts and space stations circling in low-earth orbit.
How to Celebrate Internet Day
Why don’t you start your celebration of Internet Day by visiting the original website, which just so happens to still be online! Take a moment to gander at its high-quality graphics, it’s utterly sleek and streamlined design, and the sheer high-tech embodied by the first website ever. Absolutely stunning? No?
Realize that at its time, this was the internet, this was how things were designed and put together. So low was the rate at which data could be transferred that images were to be a dream of a distant future, one that would come along swiftly, and with advances and innovations that couldn’t be imagined at that point.
Then go and do your favorite things, visit with your friends, read up on your favorite forums, and generally take some time to appreciate how far the internet has come in the days that followed. Internet Day is a reminder to all of us that this amazing invention started out with two letters “L” and “O”, before we ever were able to login to trillions of website’s put up by billions of users.
Posted by UCLA on Jan 13, 2009 – Internet pioneer and UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock discusses the process of connecting the first host computer to the fledgling Internet, then known as the ARPANET, in September 1969, and sending the first host-to-host message a month later on October 29, 1969.
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