15 May 2025
It’s hard to imagine life without the internet. Yet, not too long ago, even sending a single message between two computers was groundbreaking. From the labs of the U.S. Department of Defense to the living rooms of over five billion people today, the story of the internet is a tale of vision, urgency, and unrelenting curiosity.
1969: A Network is Born
The seeds of the internet were sown during the Cold War — a time when information, not just arms, became a critical frontier. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) commissioned a revolutionary experiment: create a communication system that could survive a nuclear strike and still operate.
Thus, ARPANET was born. On October 29, 1969, a message was sent from a computer at UCLA to another at Stanford Research Institute. The message was supposed to say “LOGIN,” but the system crashed after just two letters: “LO.”
It was enough. A new era had begun.
TCP/IP: The Internet Takes Shape
In the early years, ARPANET was limited to elite institutions and defense agencies. But the goal was bigger — a standardized way for computers to talk across different networks. Enter TCP/IP, a set of communication protocols developed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in the 1970s.
On January 1, 1983, ARPANET officially switched to TCP/IP. This was the defining moment that transformed a collection of separate networks into the interconnected internet.
It wasn’t just military. Universities, research labs, and eventually commercial entities began to join the grid. The foundation had been laid.
1989: Enter the Web
While the internet now connected machines, it lacked a user-friendly interface. You had to know commands — there were no images, no links, and certainly no cat videos.
In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland, proposed a radical idea: a way to share and navigate information using hypertext. This became the World Wide Web.
By 1991, the first website was live. By the mid-1990s, with the rise of browsers like Netscape, the internet exploded into public consciousness — moving from labs and universities to classrooms, homes, and cafes.
A Digital Revolution
Fast-forward to today: over 5.4 billion people use the internet for everything from ordering groceries to managing businesses, forming revolutions to falling in love.
It powers cloud computing, artificial intelligence, streaming, social media, e-commerce, and so much more. And it’s still evolving — with technologies like 5G, quantum networking, and satellite internet poised to define the next era.
But its origin story remains strikingly human: a few bold thinkers, a lot of cables, and a vision to connect, share, and endure.
“The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”
— Bill Gates
