Happy 50th ARPANET

The Embryonic Internet

You could say today is the 50th birthday of the Internet, or you could be more accurate and describe it as the first time a successful mostly packet based remote login between two computers over the first existent general-purpose computer network took place.  Previous tests involved some or most of those features, but not all of them at the same time which is what made this particular test so important.

It was conducted by two people, Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal in UCLA and sent the transmission to Bill Duvall, at the Stanford Research Institute on the other side of California, however behind the scenes a large group of people were involved, some of whom remain working at those institutions to this day.  If you haven’t seen it before and are curious just where this series of tubes we all use originated you should follow the link above as well as this Gizmodo one right here. 

By the way, hypertext is a wee bit younger.