Internet Version 1.0: The beta version of the worldwide web

It was the late 1960s and computer centers were springing up on college campuses and research centers around the country. But sharing information between those centers? That was extremely difficult to do. Users had to load data onto tapes and then send them to other users.

There had to be a way to connect all these computers and computing centers, right? That wish became reality with ARPANET, which established its first permanent link 55 years ago today.

ARPANET would lead to the Internet. Which would enrich our lives in so many ways ... with social media memes, cat videos and phishing text messages.

A Need For Computers To Communicate

The modern era of computing began shortly after World War II and came to life in 1951 when the first electronic computer built specifically for commercial purposes was put to use by the customer that bought it: the U.S. Census Bureau.

The enormous expense of such a gadget limited the base of customers, of course. Most of the UNIVAC I units would be purchased by the Atomic Energy Commission, Remington Rand, General Electric and the military.

Over time, as the cost of computers gradually fell, universities and other research facilities climbed aboard the computing revolution. Which led to the need for a way of sharing information between computers — a method that would better utilize the existing phone lines of the day.

The solution — which came to be called “packet switching” — came about as the result of two scientists, working independently.

In 1964, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation designed a decentralized communications system for the U.S. Air Force, which wanted a system that would continue to work even if one of its nodes was destroyed.

A year later, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K., came up with a way of storing information in “packets”: blocks of data, 128 bytes each, that could be disassembled and then re-assembled by computers.

The Building of a National Computer Network

Also in the mid-1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense was looking for a way to link computers in remote locations. The Advanced Research Projects Agency — or ARPA — was put in charge of the project.

Seizing upon the concept of packet switching, computer scientists began to develop Interface Message Processors — or IMPs — that would essentially serve as the first network routers.

On Oct. 29, 1969, the first link was set up over a 50 kilobit per second phone line between two of ARPA’s centers: One at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, and one at UCLA.

UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, attempted to log in to the Stanford computer by typing “login.” He got as far as the “l” and “o” before the system crashed.

On the second attempt, the system worked fine. It wouldn’t be until Nov. 21, 1969, that the link between the first two nodes of what they began calling ARPANET was made a permanent one.

Two weeks later, two more nodes — one at the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics center at the University of California at Santa Barbara and one in the graphics department of the University of Utah — were brought online.

The IMP that enabled ARPANET in 1969 in Wikimedia Commons

A timeline of the building of the ARPANET!

The Next Generation of Networking

ARPANET and its successors proved the value of global networking. But with the rapid adoption of home computers came the need for a system that could be used by even more users. It also needed to work on different systems and it needed to be easy to learn and to use.

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, a physics lab in Switzerland, proposed a system that would include what he called “hyperlinks.” A user could click on a hyperlink and be taken to another file with more data.

This was what Berners-Lee’s ENQUIRE system did. But it didn’t do it quite well enough: It didn’t have the ability to incorporate images, for one thing. But it would serve as a first draft for Berners-Lee’s big breakthrough a decade later: HTML, or hypertext markup language, that could be used on any computer to create pages of information. Even more importantly, these pages contain links to pages on other pages hosted on computers called servers and all linked via the growing internet.

The result would be a “web” of information. Hence, the name: World Wide Web.

By late 1990, Berners-Lee was distributing his work on the World Wide Web to the public. The next year, the High Performance Computing and Communication Act — also known as the Gore Bill, after Sen. Al Gore, who introduced the legislation — would lead to connecting existing networks into what would become known as “the information superhighway.”

The Gore Bill also provided funding for the development of Mosaic — which, in 1993, would become the world’s first popularly used web browser.

Time Berners-Lee, CERN