Happy International Internet Day!
While it might seem that there is a ‘day’ for everything, International Internet Day has a really important message behind it.
October 29th has been declared as the day to celebrate the invention that has made our lives easier, brought us closer together and – most importantly – brought emojis into our lives! Today marks as the International Internet Day.
The internet is the perfect storm of ingenuity, because without hundreds of other inventions (electricity for one) the internet would have never been possible. You would be hard pressed to find many other inventions that have had such an impact on our daily lives.
Why October 29th?
October 29th marks as the anniversary of the first internet transmission. On this day in 1969, in the basement of the computer science department at UCLA, a young graduate student named Leonard Kleinrock prepared to send the very first message over an internet connection. The men waiting for the message were Charley Kline and Bill Duvall at the University of Utah.
As the story goes, the men were trying to send and receive the word ‘login’. Charley Kline explained the events in an interview with AOL in 2011:
“So I’m on the phone to SRI and I type the L and say, “OK I typed in L, you got that?” Bill Duvall, the guy at SRI, is watching his monitor and he has the L. I type the O. Got the O. Typed the G. “Wait a minute”, Bill says, “my system crashed. I’ll call you back”. […] He fixed that and an hour later it all worked, so I could type commands and use his system remotely. And that was the beginning. That was October 29th 1969.”
These seemingly small actions will always be remembered as the first packets sent through what would come to be known twenty years later as ‘the internet’. Now as fans and users of the internet, our job is to celebrate this momentous day.
How to celebrate International Internet Day:
Step 1: Learn more about the history of the internet. A good place to start is this awesome TED Talk with Ted Berners-Lee.
Step 2: Talk to people about internet day through the internet (of course).
Step 3: Send us a Tweet about your awesome International Internet Day plans or feel free to copy and paste this message:
‘L’ ‘O’ …
Happy International Internet Day!
#FirstMessage #Midphase
Step 4: Check out the very first web page (yes it’s still available) at: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Happy International Internet Day everyone!
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