The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching, using standard IP (Internet Protocol). The Internet has become an essential part of our lives. It is a creation of modern technology and high-end science, through which our lives have become easier and simpler.
International Internet Day is celebrated worldwide, every year on 29th of October. Since the year 2005, the International Internet Day has been famously celebrated to commemorate a momentous day in the history of telecommunications and technology.
This was the event of the sending of the first message, first electronic message which was transferred from one computer to another in 1969. This was situated in California, in the USA. Today, the International Internet Day is also an on-line project germinating from the society, of the society and for the society. The International Internet Day project is open to everyone and anyone just as access to the Internet is open and free for everyone. The International Internet Day, thus, celebrates this grand democratic fervor which in essential is linked to this idea of liberation, where everyone is afforded an equal opportunity and an equal advantage to share of services, which connect the world to each other.
The Internet, defined as a remote connection between two computers, was first achieved on October 29, 1969 (just a few months after Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon). In the glow of a green monochrome screen deep in the bowels of the computer science department at UCLA, a young graduate student picked up his phone and called the computer lab at Stanford. He is preparing to send the first message over an Internet connection. The men on either end of the phone are Charley Kline and Bill Duvall.
The journey to this era of easy communication wasn’t exactly as simple as surfing up information on Google. The present scenario has been preceded by years of attempts including failed attempts to render digital data visible to everyone, instead of using teleprinters and other devices. At the time when history was being made, Internet was known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). This was the year of 1969 when Charley Kline, a student programmer at the UCLA transmitted the first ever message on 29th of October in 1969. This event was to follow only few months after the first man landed on the moon. Great things were happening in the world, and this was one of it. Charley Kline, working under the supervision of Professor Leonard Kleinrock, transmitted a message from the computer housed at the UCLA to a computer positioned at the Stanford Research Institute’s computer.
The two computers, one at the UCLA was the SDS Sigma 7 Host computer and the receiver was the SDS 940 Host at the Stanford Research Institute. Interestingly enough the message was a text message comprising the word ‘login’. But as it would transpire only the letter L and O could be transmitted across, because following the initial transmission the system collapsed and the transmission crashed.
The World Wide Web (often used synonymously, but incorrectly, with the internet itself) became possible in 1989. It began with the invention of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN. The World Wide Web project was formally announced on August 6, 1991.
Most people had never heard of the Internet before the early 1990s when sales systems started showing up on computer boards. While sales systems were one of the first public uses of the internet, the first online transactions happened nearly two decades earlier. Way back in 1971 and 1972, students at MIT and Stanford used the network to arrange cannabis deliveries. Up until that point, the extent of the internet network was limited to Universities, Government agencies, and select niches of the scientific community.
In the 1980s, bulletin board system services (BBSs) were developed by hobbyists to facilitate communication between people with common, and often obscure, interests. Some of these group started Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) to play an online version of Dungeons & Dragons. It was in these forums that the spam phenomenon began. No one is sure who the first person who used it was, but someone created a keyboard macro program to type the words SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM repeatedly every few seconds to imitate the Monty Python sketch.
This method became a popular way of shutting new members out of a conversation and making them leave a chat environment so the original members could carry on their conversations uninterrupted. But it was also used to intentionally disrupt certain boards. Star Wars fans often entered Star Trek BBSs specifically to “spam” them. Soon there were other macro created that dumped huge amounts of text on the boards. These macros were all referred to as “spam” within the community.
As the Internet grew and email solicitations became a common phenomenon, it was an easy leap for BBS “spam” to lend its name to email “spam”. Today, it’s a catch-all term for anything that qualifies as “Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages”.
The Internet is everywhere these days, being accessed on phones and tablets, tied into our cameras and our TV’s. Wi-Fi is accessible from everywhere these days, from city buses to your neighborhood McDonald’s, and the world grows smaller every day as a result. Internet Day is a celebration of this culmination of computing and communication technology, and they way it has brought all our lives together.
