Forty years ago today–on October 29, 1969–the ARPANET node at UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science connected with the node at SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California.
I was born the following year.
When I was eleven years old, the Internet consisted of 213 room-filling computers.
On April 4, 1994, I turned twenty four.
That same day, the Mosaic Communications Corporation was founded and they launched a little product called Netscape–and created the gateway through which millions of people jumped online.
Has the Internet made the world a better place? It has certainly made it more shareable. Every day, I communicate with people all over the world. When you and I are online, there are no borders. Is this a model for the rest of the world, the one outside of the Internet? Perhaps in forty years, that question will have been answered. It probably won't be utopia, but it just might be better than what came before.
Happy birthday, Internet. Good luck. Good luck to us all.
