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A byte of cake? Internet turns 30 WebPosted Thu Sep 2 11:59:18 1999 - LOS ANGELES - Thirty years ago today, before mice became attached to apples and a teenager named Bill Gates began polishing windows, a computer made a connection, and history: the birth of the Internet. It was a modest start, but down the road -- later renamed the information superhighway -- the experiment conducted on Sept. 2, 1969 would change the way the world communicates. In the early days, the Internet was known as the ARPAnet, and users logged in rather than on. But there was nothing to log on to until researchers came up with a way to get computers to talk to one another. The vital first step happened in California, where a team of academics at UCLA hooked up a computer to a special switch the size of a refrigerator, called an "interphase message processor". Until a signal was sent to that switch, a world wide network was out of reach, according to UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, often credited as the "Father of the Internet". The next stage was to get two computers to "talk" to one another. That happened about six weeks later, on Oct. 20, 1969, when a group of researchers at UCLA sent a message to another team at the Stanford Research Institute in northern California. Some purists consider October 20 to be the Internet's actual birthday, but Kleinrock says it's debatable because they wouldn't have had the second connection without the first. A special conference being held at UCLA Thursday has decided to recognize Sept. 2. The Internet began as a way to allow researchers to communicate with one another quickly and easily. It was funded by the U.S. government's Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and gave people at one university access to the files on a computer at another centre. Now, of course, everything from e-mail to television news stories is being sent at the speed of light around the World Wide Web. In an interview with Reuters recently, Kleinrock said ARPAnet began as a technological assignment, with no thought given to the social effects that many people are now all wired up over. "We did not think about the potential dangers," he said in a recent interview with Reuters. "We talked about bits and bytes, and routers and switches. We did not talk about: Will little Charlie do his homework on it, or will he look at pornography?" With hindsight, Kleinrock now believes researchers ignored their responsibility to at least think about a code of conduct, and discuss whether to limit the use of the Internet. But he has no regrets about what they created. "Would I do it again? You bet," he said. <http://www.cbcnews.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/1999/09/02/webbirth990902> janet paterson 52 now / 41 dx / 37 onset 613 256 8340 po box 171 almonte ontario canada K0A 1A0 a new voice: <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/6263/> <[log in to unmask]>