Yesterday might have been an important birthday, and then again, it might not. It all depends on how you define the origins of the Internet.
Some people think the Net turned a sprightly 30 yesterday (or perhaps a few days before). Others would argue that the proper birthday is early October, 1969, or even January 1st, 1983, making everyone's favourite global network just sweet 16 (if not quite innocent). The date discrepancies depend on whether we're talking embryos or full-fledged births, but either way this evidence of the Internet's relative longevity might surprise people who tend to think of the Internet as a very, very recent phenomenon.
It was on September 2nd, 1969 - some say August 30th - that a refrigerator sized, 900-pound, $250,000 computer called IMP (Interface Message Processor - snappy brand names obviously weren't a key selling point in the technology industry back then) was rigged up to another refrigerator-sized computer called a Sigma7 at the University of California at Los Angeles. The UCLA IMP would have the honour of eventually becoming Node 1 on the infant Internet.
The machine was welcomed on its arrival at UCLA by a small, champagne-bearing party which included Vint Cerf, the man who was a key member here of the Government's Advisory Committee on Telecommunications.
In the 1970s, Mr Cerf would co-invent Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/ IP, the "language" that allows computers to talk to each other over telephone lines - the development that made a global network an affordable possibility. On September 2nd - or August 30th - the two computers went through a test run to see if they would communicate with each other properly, in preparation for a later attempt to get the IMP to talk to another computer located in Menlo Park, California.
Anyway, the effort worked, and thus, Node 1 showed it was capable of functioning the way researchers had hoped. Is that the correct point at which to say the Internet was born? Maybe you prefer the first week of October, 1969. A month after Node 1 went live, Node 2, another IMP, arrived at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park. The machine was turned on and set up and the two-node ARPAnet (for Advanced Research Projects Agency network) was ready to be tested. Of course, the Internet now consists of millions upon millions of nodes.
As Mr Cerf tells it, an undergraduate research student at UCLA dialled a researcher standing next to the IMP at SRI. The voice line was carried along the same phone line that linked the two computers. The UCLA student prepared to connect to the SRI computer, which required typing in the command "login" on the UCLA computer.
He typed an L, which was transmitted in the form of a numbered code to the IMP in Menlo Park. Then he typed an O, which also went successfully over the network. Then he typed a G - and the system crashed. Perhaps that event more closely registers with modern users of the Web as the true Internet experience.
January 1st, 1983 gets a nomination as well because it is the day that TCP/IP was accepted as a standard, thus becoming the way in which all computers would communicate with each other over the Internet. Without a standard, several different systems could have evolved, which could have meant your computer would only be able to link to a fraction of the computers on the Net. The swift growth of a relatively cheap, international network depended on the widespread adoption of this important protocol.
Whatever day you prefer - heck, why not celebrate them all? - it's amazing in retrospect that the thing ever came into being at all.
For the most part, the thousands of mostly nameless researchers who contributed to the Net's development worked without close or even particularly co-ordinated supervision, sometimes on renegade projects, often with no other goal in mind than contributing to a project that fascinated them and seemed an important contribution to the future.
They shaped the communal, not-for-profit ethos which dominated the Internet until it became a mass phenomenon but that still underlies it and influences much of its administration.
Anyone interested in how the tale unfolds might want to toast the network's birth by tracking down the highly readable history of the Net, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the Origins of the Internet, by husband and wife team Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Published in 1996, the book reads like a good novel and is that rare item, a tech history page-turner.
Or for the day that's in it, use the Net. The most venerable of Internet history sites is Hobbes' Internet Timeline, http:// info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/ Internet/History/HIT.html. Or try the Web History Project archives at www.webhistory.org. Writer Bruce Sterling has his brief history at www.forthnet.gr/forthnet/isoc/ short.history.of.internet, and other Net history links can be found at the Michigan Public Library site, http://mel.lib.mi.us/ internet/INET-history.html. Just try not to get the keyboard gummed up with the birthday cake.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
