by BRINLEE VUOLA
Staff Writer
The internet has become a very vital part of our daily lives; it’s hard to imagine our lives without it. On October 29, 1969, just 50 years ago, the internet was born. The first direct message was sent from one computer to another. It was sent from one computer at the University of California to the other at the Stanford Research Institute. The message was originally supposed to say “Login”, but due to a network crash, the only letters that were able to send were “L” and “O”. “LO” became the first message sent over the internet, and it is still remembered today. Although there was a network crash preventing the whole message from being sent, software crashes are still common today, so rather than it being a failure, many are calling it a “historic crash” — just the first step to where we are now.
After that experience, the internet only continued to grow. In the late 1980s, International Business Machines (IBM) helped to create a big network called the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) that, according to an article by ibm.com, “changed business and life around the world forever”. At the time, it was only used by researchers and scientists who collaborated on things together; they could now do so without physically traveling around the world. During this time, many of those same collaborating scientists were working on what we call “the World Wide Web”, which is now what we call our everyday search browsers, blogs, and online shopping sites. To make a long description short, by August 6, 1991, the World Wide Web was now accessible to the high majority of people all around the world. It was still slow and a tad expensive, but the hardest part of working the network and getting it spread around to the public was over by that time. Over the years, scientists continued to upgrade the web, and even today, upgrades and changes are being made. Now, with just a single click and a couple of taps on the keyboard, people all over our world can get any information they wish to on important topics or things they wish to learn more about.
It’s important to understand how far we’ve come. In only 50 years, we went from a single message being slowly sent (halfway interrupted by a network crash) to have all the information about our world that we could possibly need at our own fingertips. 50 years is not a very long time, so the amount of progress our world has been making is extremely impressive, at least in my perspective. And things still continue to change today, even if those changes are a bit more minuscule than it was many years ago. It truly is a beautiful process that not many people are aware of, so on days like yesterday, when another year with the internet has passed by, it’s important to recognize this progress and get at least a little bit of understanding of where these things first started. This is how far we’ve come, and it’ll only continue to grow from here.