Comment on 40 years on, the Internet transmits every aspect of our lives

On Aug. 27, 1976, a team led by Don Nielson, then assistant director of telecommunications at Menlo Park engineering firm SRI International, drove a specially equipped van 6½ miles south and parked at Zott’s. Forty years later, people read the news on their phones, book beds in strangers’ homes, stalk their friends on Facebook, post videos on YouTube, program their vacuuming robots and fitness-tracking watches, and chase invisible monsters through city streets. Without the capital I, an internet is just a network of networks — more than one network connected together. In the 1970s, Nielson’s team used the still-experimental Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol to run their tests of what would one day become the modern Internet. The company had a corporate network connecting 70,000 employees and an internal electronic mail system. Larry Downes was also experimenting with an external mail system at his job at Andersen Consulting, now known as Accenture. (In a 1999 interview with CNN, Gore described his role as taking “the initiative in creating the Internet,” a statement that drew widespread ridicule.) UUNet, PSINet and Sprint emerged as some of the earliest Internet service providers. The same law also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which opened a site at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [...] a graduate student named Marc Andreessen decided to build a browser for the World Wide Web, a system created by European researcher Tim Berners-Lee, which let people access words and images stored on any other Internet-connected machine. Downes remembers seeing Andreessen demonstrate his Web browser, Mosaic, at an industry conference in the early ’90s. Andreessen’s work on Mosaic led to Netscape, whose initial public offering in August 1995 kicked off the dot-com boom and put Web browsers on millions of computers. Google, started as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford in 1997, would eclipse them all. Google, which allowed anyone to find almost any information stored on the Web, was an example of the Internet’s purpose, said Bennett: “It was the abolition of distance as a constraint on communication.” Despite his lack of a diploma, he got a job at Digital Equipment Corp., where he worked on connecting DEC’s network with the rest of the world. Vixie loved that people could use the Internet to learn about people and cultures they didn’t know. After getting kicked off of every Internet service provider for sending spam, Wallace created a program in 1995 where he would give people free computers and an Internet connection so long as he could use their connection to send spam. Frustrated, Vixie started the first antispam company, MAPS, the next year and shut down Wallace’s operation, Cyber Promotions. Yet, he thinks the efficiency the Internet created has a “net positive effect.”