Apparently the internet turned 40 today! Isn’t that just an amazing accomplishment as to how human and technology has evolved? I was only in my pre-teens when the web went public!

Here’s a piece of the excerpt from the same article that marked the 10 key milestones of the almighty internet which I find really interesting:

October 29, 1969: Often regarded as the other key ‘birthday’ of the internet, this was the day the first message was sent between computers at different sites – when a computer at UCLA sent the message ‘login’ to a computer at Stanford. Unfortunately, the system crashed, so only ‘lo’ was sent.

Late 1971: The first emails are sent over the ARPANET network, by Ray Tomlinson – who would also propose the @ sign as being a crucial part of email addresses. Tomlinson says he’s forgotten what those first emails actually said, but suspects they were just nonsense text.

1973: The first ARPANET nodes outside of the USA join the network, in the UK and Norway.

January 1985: The first ‘top-level domains’ – .com, .net, .org, .gov, .edu and .mil – are created.

November 2, 1988: The first major internet worm, written by a student, brings down thousands of computers as it spreads across the network.

Christmas 1990: Tim Berners-Lee, working at nuclear research centre CERN, creates the first World Wide Web server.

August 6, 1991: Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web to the world, and the web goes public for the first time.

1993: Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, is released, bringing a new level of popularity and accessibility to the web.

4 September, 1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate their new search engine company, Google, from a friend’s garage in California.

2014: Microsoft finally stops supporting Internet Explorer 6. Wild celebrations ensue worldwide, and a new era of peace and harmony descends over the planet.

What an amazing 40 years of history and development.

The next time anyone (especially those in marketing/advertising) says that internet “is a trend and not relevant to my consumers” really deserves a good smack on the head.