Happy Birthday to The Internet
This week marks the 30th birthday of the modern day Internet. On January 1, 1983, all computers on ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor switched over to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP for short). These two new and innovative technologies revolutionized the way computers could be linked together.
Vint Cerf , Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, who co created TCP/IP, marked the anniversary with a post on the search engine’s official blog. Cerf recalls the work that he and Bob Kahn undertook and says that the main emotion he remembers looking back on that day was relief.
There were no grand celebrations (at the start of 1983)– I can’t even find a photograph. The only visible mementos were “I survived the TCP/IP switchover” pins worn by those who went through the ordeal.
The switch was much needed. At the start of the 1980’s ARPANET had roughly 1,000 computers connected on the network and it was quickly growing. To handle the larger and more complicated network, ARPANET needed a new protocol. The general public was unaware of what was happening, and Internet Pioneers hardly understood the changes being made.
About 10 years later, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee used the new Internet protocol that Cerf and others pioneered, to start the World Wide Web. And in the early 90’s, the public started hearing about email and the “Information Super Highway,” although not exactly sure what these were.
In a recent article, Kim Bielenberg (@KimBielenberg), Journalist at Irish Independent recalls her days as a younger reporter in 1993 and being invited to see the Internet working in a shop off Grafton Street.
It took about 30 minutes before we were connected to an actual website on the Internet, and I remember greeting this new-fangled phenomenon with skepticism, remarking that there were “terrible traffic jams’’ on the Information Super highway.
At that time there were so few websites that there was an actual map of the World Wide Web. I was shown a few Irish websites that seemed to say little other than announce that they were there.
Most of the Irish sites seemed to be based in university computer departments. It was perhaps a sign of things to come that one of the sites had a list of jokes, but they would not have been out of place in Christmas crackers.
Two years later, a company called Real launched its Real Audio player; the first application capable of streaming recorded and live audio. And finally the Internet began rolling out to the public.
It is hard to imagine a world without all of the technological comforts we now take for granted.
Vint Cerf said of his invention this week, “While we had high hopes we did not dare to assume that the Internet would turn into the worldwide platform it’s become.”