The NewsDemon Blog

Precisely forty years ago on September 2, Leonard Kleinrock and some other associates started testing a system that would eventually become the worldwide network we know as the internet today.

Revisiting World Wide Web newsgroups, we spotlight on the history of the internet in celebration of its 40th birthday.

On September 2, 1969, two computers send out test data at Kleinrock’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. That was the humble beginning of what was originally called the ‘ARPANET‘ network — a government-supported data network that would use the technology which by then had come to be known as “packet switching.”

From this point on DARPA and ARPANET became the biological manufacturing parents of the internet and are two of the most important acronyms pertaining to the internet.

(DARPA) is the central research and development office for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) otherwise referred to as The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The ARPANET is the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network that was created by (ARPA) and it is essentially the predecessor of the global Internet.

It would be 10 years later that the USENET would come to be utilizing the ARPANET. It would be the USENET that would bring the masses online. With the introduction of newsgroups, a new online word of discussion groups arose.

Later, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee used the USENET to announce the foundation of what we know the Word Wide Web to be today.

Tthe continuing growth of the internet community forced an expansion of its development and use. As time passed and as the popularity of the Internet grew, competition eventually made the internet  more accessible and its availability even more widespread.

Len Kleinrock and his team never imagined the spread of all of the Internet trends and fads that would follow. But since using the World Wide Web became commonplace among average people, the medium has quickly evolved and gone through several different stages.

Contrary to claims once made by Al Gore, it was not invented by him.

Coincidently, the first domain name ever registered was sold on August 31st of this year.

On March 15, 1985, the Internet officially became active with the registration and use of the Symbolics.com domain name.

Said to be the oldest on the web, it has remained the property of its original owner since then. Symbolics.com was bought by XF.com Investments, which said it was “excited” about the purchase.

The address was registered by computer manufacturer Symbolics in March 1985, months before rivals Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Sun Microsystems swooped to secure their own presence on the nascent web.

Nearly 25 years later, over 180,000,000 registered domains are currently in use.