Happy Birthday Internet

Global network turns 40

Leonard Kleinrock with IMP1.

Forty years ago today, the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) was plugged in and switched on in Len Kleinrock’s lab at the University of California. For the first time, one computer could pass data to another across separate networks: in this case, between two UCLA machines through a 15-foot cable.

By the end of the year, three more IMPs had been added to what was then called ARPANET, the network that would eventually become the internet. While it would be another 22 years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, making the internet accessible to anyone with a computer and a modem, it’s Kleinrock and his colleagues who are responsible for the network we all take for granted today.