The Internet is 40

October 29, 1969. This is the day the Internet said it’s first word:’Lo’ as in ‘Lo and behold here comes the Internet’!! And then it crashed.

 


They had actually planned to say ‘login’ but when the ‘g’ was entered by Charley Kline, a graduate student, the network crashed.
So much for an auspicious beginning.

 

This is the log of that first message.

 

Log of the First Internet Message

 

Obviously, no one imagined it could become something so big. The first time I used the Internet was in the mid-nineties (must have been ’95 or ’96) when I was in college. My cousin had got a dial-up Internet account from VSNL. There was no Internet Explorer.
We had to use ‘Lynx’ the text based browser. To say that we liked the concept of ‘chat’ would be an understatement.

 

Also, there were virtually no Indian websites; at least none that I can remember now. We also didn’t know about viruses and worms, didn’t download songs or videos, didn’t buy anything online, hadn’t heard of SQL-Injection, didn’t do voice chats or video chats, didn’t Twitter or connect with friends on Facebook, didn’t think that we could become dependant on the Internet.

 

But, the novelty of being able to communicate via email and chat was really huge; though we had to access a POP3 account on a VSNL server with forgettable email ID that looked like something@giasbma.vsnl.net.in

 

What began as a way to exchange information has become much bigger than what was envisaged.

 

The contents of “The Internet is 80” is anybody’s guess.

Comments are closed.