It is hard to imagine a day without the internet, yet it is younger than many of the people using it. The history of the internet runs from a crashed computer in a Los Angeles university to a satellite link that finally connected Australia, and then to the web, smartphones and everything since. Here is the story in brief.
What the internet actually is
The internet is a global network of networks: millions of computers, phones and servers, connected by cables, fibre, satellites and radio, all agreeing to use the same set of rules, or protocols, to send information to each other. It is not the same as the web. The web, the pages you visit in a browser, is one service that runs on top of the internet, alongside others such as email and video calls.
1969: the first message, which crashed
The internet grew out of ARPANET, a research network funded by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. On 29 October 1969, a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, hundreds of kilometres away. He typed “L”, then “O”, and then the system crashed. So the first message ever sent over the network that would become the internet was simply “LO”. Within weeks, four sites were linked, according to The Star’s internet timeline.
The 1970s and 80s: a common language
Throughout the 1970s, ARPANET grew, email was invented, and in 1973 it made its first connections outside the US, to Norway and the UK. But different networks spoke different languages. The breakthrough came from Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who in 1974 published the design for a common set of rules that would let any network talk to any other. Their TCP/IP protocols were officially adopted on 1 January 1983, a date often treated as the internet’s real birthday, as The Star’s timeline notes. The Domain Name System followed in the mid-1980s, giving us addresses ending in .com and .org instead of strings of numbers.
The night Australia joined the internet
Australia was a latecomer, mostly because a permanent link across the Pacific was so expensive. For years, Australian universities swapped email with overseas researchers through dial-up phone calls. The .au domain was created in 1986 and handed to Robert Elz, a network programmer at the University of Melbourne, who ran it largely voluntarily for years, according to the Pearcey Foundation. Then, on the night of 23 June 1989, Elz and Torben Nielsen of the University of Hawaii completed a 56 kilobit-per-second satellite link between the two universities, partly funded by NASA. When it came up, Nielsen sent a message to Melbourne announcing that the link was up, as a 1999 article in The Age records. Australia was online.
The universities quickly formed AARNet, the Australian Academic and Research Network, which in 1990 built a national backbone from Brisbane to Perth, with the hub at the University of Melbourne, according to Wikipedia. In 1992, AARNet began letting commercial internet providers onto its network, and the internet started to reach Australian homes, mostly through slow, noisy dial-up modems.
The web changes everything
Until the early 1990s, the internet was mostly used by researchers, for email, file sharing and discussion groups. That changed when Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN in Switzerland, proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 and launched the first website a couple of years later, a story I tell in why does the inventor of the web regret the double slash? Easy-to-use browsers followed in the mid-1990s, along with the first big commercial websites, search engines and online shops, and the internet went mainstream.
So who invented the internet?
No single person did, which is one reason the question causes so many arguments. ARPANET was built by teams of engineers and researchers, but if anyone deserves the title, it is usually given to Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, whose TCP/IP protocols let separate networks join into one, and who are often called the fathers of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee is sometimes called the inventor of the internet too, but what he invented was the web, the system of linked pages that runs on top of it, as I explain in my post on why he regrets the double slash.
The key milestones
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1969 | ARPANET sends its first message, “LO”, before crashing |
| 1971 | Email is sent between computers on the network |
| 1973 | ARPANET connects to Norway and the UK |
| 1974 | Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish the design for TCP |
| 1983 | ARPANET switches to TCP/IP, the internet’s common language |
| 1986 | Australia’s .au domain is created |
| 1989 | Australia connects to the internet; Tim Berners-Lee proposes the web |
| 1991 | The World Wide Web becomes available outside CERN |
| 1992 | Commercial internet providers start reaching Australians through AARNet |
| Late 1990s | Search engines and online shopping go mainstream |
| 2000s | Broadband, social media and smartphones arrive |
From a crashed login to everywhere
In less than 60 years, the internet has gone from a two-letter message between two universities to something most of us carry in our pockets. It grew because a few researchers agreed on shared rules rather than building rival networks, and because people like Robert Elz in Melbourne did the patient, often unpaid work of connecting their corner of the world. In Australia, it went from one satellite link to a university in Hawaii to the National Broadband Network in a single generation. If you enjoy the stories behind everyday technology, see why does the inventor of the web regret the double slash? and why is Bluetooth called Bluetooth?
Sources
- The Star: A timeline of the internet
- Pearcey Foundation: Early Australian internet
- The Conversation: How Australia connected to the internet 25 years ago
- The Age, archived by Roger Clarke: 10 years since Australia hooked on to the internet (1999)
- Wikipedia: AARNet
- University of Melbourne: The early internet