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The internet is 40 years old, how far we have come.

by timpears
9 replies
I was just perusing Fox News web site and watching a few videos. I stumbled on a story from Oct 30 that the first internet message was sent fourty years ago on that date. I hadn't realized it was that old. Time sure flies when you are having fun. But this story gives the credit to some scientist, when I thought that Al Gore told us he invented it.

Anyway, I am going to try and embed the video if I can. Well that didn't work so I will just give the link.

http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.h...istId=playlist
#internet #years
  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    Tim, thanks for the video...

    Funny how even journalists covering the story seem to think that the WWW is the Internet.

    Talk to them about gopher, Archie, Veronica and such and they think you brought a comic book onto the Love Boat...

    We've come a long way since "IM" meant waiting for a check in the snail mail, waiting for it to clear, then emailing or using ftp to transfer text files.

    Suddenly, I feel old...
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  • Profile picture of the author mywebwork
    I'm showing my age but I remember most of this!

    The Internet was originally the ARPA Net, a military project to create an uninterruptible communications network. It had very little resemblance to the Internet we now know. The biggest advance (in the early 70's) was the adaptation of TCP/IP protocol, and I've always admired the foresight that the people who put that together had. I mean, at the time there were maybe 100 computers maximum on the whole network, yet they designed a protocol with 4 billion potential addresses! Talk about design overkill, but it sure paid off.

    Personally my first Internet experience was in 1989 when I obtained my first e-mail address - I worked for the Government of Alberta (Canada) and we were fortunate to obtain several Class B IP address assignments back when no one really knew the significance of this. There was no hypertext or websites then, you used programs like Telnet, Gopher and Veronica to access information, mostly from university and government sites around the globe. I used to be thrilled how I could get information from computers in Israel from my home in Edmonton - hey it was a new thing back then!

    Eventually came the web and the Netscape web browser, my first version (Netscape Beta 0.8) ran on Windows 3.1 and implemented TCP/IP sockets with a (then popular) Australian product called "Trumpet Winsock". I wrote my first web pages in the early 1990's using Notepad (my very first page was one for my young son and featured a number of Sesame Street characters)!

    Sure wish I'd got into Internet Marketing at the very beginning. It should be interesting to see what the next 40 years bring!

    Bill
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  • Profile picture of the author cashcow
    Yep, a lot of progress in 40 years though I think.

    I don't want to date myself, but remember when the internet was all text with no graphics?

    I also remember some predicting that people would NEVER have computers in their homes!

    Yes, sadly, I remember punch cards too....
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Originally Posted by cashcow View Post

      Yep, a lot of progress in 40 years though I think.

      I don't want to date myself, but remember when the internet was all text with no graphics?

      I also remember some predicting that people would NEVER have computers in their homes!

      Yes, sadly, I remember punch cards too....
      I almost went blind trying to read dot-matrix all caps in bright green on a black screen - and I had one of those big 12" monitors, too.

      And I'd almost suppressed the memory of punch cards run through the university computers. Since I wasn't a priority project, I'd dump my carefully-stacked-and-banded deck into a bin that would run when there was nothing more important to run. A day or two later, I could pick up the deck, usually accompanied by a single sheet with the dreaded words "would not compile"...

      SHUDDER....
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    • Profile picture of the author danhughes
      Originally Posted by cashcow View Post

      Yes, sadly, I remember punch cards too....
      Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate.

      To be fair, Al Gore never said he invented the internet. Those who did are certainly grateful for his help, however.

      It all started with an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer on March 9th, 1999.
      Biltzer asked him why he should be the Democratic candidtate for the 2000 presidential election. Gore replied,
      "I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system".

      Prior to the invention of TCP/IP there were lots of small networks, but none of them could easily talk to each other and all required a central host. In that respect they were a lot like a mainframe. The invention of TCP/IP removed the need for a central controlling computer making every server a host. It also standardized the way they communicated.

      Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn came up with TCP/IP, it was their paper on the subject that first used the term internet.

      In an interview with Esquire Magazine in 2008, Vint Cerf said, "His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet. So he really does deserve credit".
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  • Profile picture of the author Fernando Veloso
    In a future upgrade can we ask a permanent removal of scammers and spammers?

    Thank You Internet!!!

    Oh and congrats on your 40 bday!!!!
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    People make good money selling to the rich. But the rich got rich selling to the masses.
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  • Profile picture of the author timpears
    I had forgotton about punch cards. But you brought that memory back to me. Sitting down at a big electonic box the size of a desk or bigger and feeding it punch cards that I had made on some machine I forget what they called it. And a bigger machine that would sort those cards and drop them into hoppers according to how we had set up the sort.

    My first personal computer had 5K of memory, with only 3.5K of usable RAM. It was a Vic20. Then I graduated to the Commodore 64. We have come a long way.
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    Tim Pears

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  • Profile picture of the author John Romaine
    Anyone here remember teletex? Those informational channels on TV. For me that was probably the first internet.
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    BS free SEO services, training and advice - SEO Point

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  • Profile picture of the author TheRichJerksNet
    Yep Bill (mywebwork) pretty much nailed it there... Heck I been here for a little bit over 25 years of it .. Before domain names, websites, browsers and all that ...

    James
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