The Guardian.co.uk’s landmark compilation of stories of 40 years of the Internet — and by those who make up the Internet: people like you and I — presents the most attractive Internet timeline just yet.
Scanning through online aggregator’s snippets, specifically of favorite, minimalist popurls.com’s site, led me to the 40-year tapestry of stories in short but very engaging prose. The linear web of accounts outlines the most important and updated milestones in the ‘Net’s continuing story that I simply feel compelled to share it here, especially to the generation that may not understand the exhilaration associated with (nor recognize the sound of) a digital modem handshake: the generation reared in broadband speed and e-games or playing “house” for hours in their chairs clicking away on their keyboards, or being highly dependent on online search engines — if not their cellphone keypads — for their homework.
…the first message (only the “L-O” of the word “L-O-G-I-N” travelled from UCLA to SRI before the first ‘Net crash…
Vinton Cerf et al. published a proposal to link up Arpa-like networks. (It) is notable for containing the first published use of the word "internet"
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The year 1969 is notable for many significant events.
In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos was reelected for another 4-year term; The Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati (then, a municipality of Rizal Province, now, a city of Metropolitan Manila) had its campus groundbreaking and admitted its first batch of students[1].
In the Middle East, Moammar Khaddafy staged a coup and ousted Libya’s King Idris. In Asia, “the United States, governments of South and North Vietnam, and the Viet Cong met for the first plenary session of peace talks in Paris, France” [2|"American Assistance to the South"], yet Cambodia was at the receiving end of the USA’s B-52 bombs[3] as exposed in the New York Times by William Beecher the same year. Meanwhile, Andy Warhol and Gerald Malanga co-founded Interview Magazine[4], The Boeing 747, which we grew up to know as the “Jumbo Jet”, took off ground for the first time [5] (as did France’s Concorde in its test flight). Dorothy Fisher became the first female heart transplant recipient under Dr. Christian Barnaard [6], and the first manned spaceflight lands on the moon [7].
Oh, that generation’s version of homeschooling, Sesame Street, premiered in the US the same year, too, and many Filipinos of the 70s, including myself, learned English grammar and alphabet from people interacting with puppets. In the flesh and beauty arena, dusky 18-year old Gloria Diaz made headlines for winning the Philipines’ first Miss Universe crown.
(if video above does not load, watch it here)
In the same year, Seiko unveiled the first quartz watch [8], the microprocessor chip was born [9], and UNIX was developed by Bell Labs [10].
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This post is populated by information made possible in one sitting without getting off my chair, as I, like many from today’s generation who I mean to address, and from the generation ahead of mine, am a beneficiary of all the events mentioned above; but, more profoundly, by this much less significant event in 1969 that is now capable of calling back the past at one’s behest.
The Guardian.co.uk calls it’s project A People’s History of the Internet and starts with the ARPANET research project that was borne out of the Cold War.
This days, many attribute the Internet as this generation’s “great leveler”. It is just 40 years old, yet, like many of the darkened areas of the world maps back in those days, the internet — as technology and way of life — has still to touch the world’s majority population.
I wonder what people’s history will be like, how the ‘Net will play out in the next 40 years, if we only look back to any of the these significant events, and learn, particularly from those that deal with conflict, crises and territoriality, to build a better world for others from here.
