Free Republic

On October 29, 1969, the internet era began as UCLA Computer Science Professor Len Kleinrock sent the first message on ARPANET, a network of computers that would evolve to become the internet. Five decades later, and 30 years since the World Wide Web brought the internet into the mainstream, global digital connectivity has fundamentally changed our world. Marking the anniversary, our founder and inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, said: “It’s astonishing to think the internet is already half a century old. But its birthday is not altogether a happy one. The internet — and the World Wide Web...

When I visited UCLA’s Boelter Hall last Wednesday, I took the stairs to the third floor, looking for Room 3420. And then I walked right by it. From the hallway, it’s a pretty unassuming place. But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California. It was the beginning of ARPANET, the small network of...

Credit for the initial concept that developed into the World Wide Web is typically given to Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961, he wrote about ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, in a paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets." Kleinrock, along with other innnovators such as J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), provided the backbone for the ubiquitous stream of emails, media, Facebook postings and tweets that are now shared online every day. Here, then, is a brief history of the Internet: The precursor to the Internet was jumpstarted in the early days of...

Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and selector of the "@" symbol, has died. He was 74. Raytheon Co., his employer, on Sunday confirmed his death; the details were not immediately available. Email existed in a limited capacity before Tomlinson in that electronic messages could be shared amid multiple people within a limited framework. But until his invention in 1971 of the first network person-to-person email, there was no way to send something to a specific person at a specific address. Here are five things to know about Tomlinson's invention: 1. The first email was sent on the ARPANET...

Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and a technological leader, died Saturday. Raytheon Co., his employer, confirmed his death; the details were not immediately available. Email existed in a limited capacity before Tomlinson in that electronic messages could be shared amid multiple people within a limited framework. But until his invention in 1971 of the first network person-to-person email, there was no way to send something to a specific person at a specific address. Tomlinson wrote and sent the first email on the ARPANET system, a computer network that was created for the U.S. government that is considered a...

Contrary to legend, it wasn't the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining communications during a war. A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet." It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon...

The world is about to run out of the internet addresses that allow computers to identify each other and communicate, the man who invented the system has told The Times. Vint Cerf, the “father of the internet” and one of the world’s leading computer scientists, said that businesses and consumers needed to act now to switch to the next generation of net addresses. Unless preparations were made now, he said, some computers might not be able to go online and the connectivity of the internet might be damaged.

Spam turning 30 this month; no gifts, please Thu May 1, 2008 12:33PM EDT See Comments (131) Buzz up!on Yahoo! The date: May 3, 1978. The culprit: Gary Thuerk, a marketer for the old Digital Equipment Corporation. His crime: Sending a sales e-mail to 393 users on Arpanet (then a U.S. government computer network and the predecessor of today's Internet). Little did Thuerk know that he'd just become the world's first spammer. That first piece of junk e-mail (which wasn't called "spam" until about 15 years later) has been memorialized over at Brad Templeton's Web site (Templeton is a Net...