Internet turns 40

PanARMENIAN.Net - The most revolutionary invention of 20th century celebrates its 40th anniversary today.



The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks.



In 1969, the Department of Defense commissions the fledgling ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) for network research. The first official network nodes were UCLA, Standford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah. The first node to node message was sent from UCLA to SRI.



The research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s when British engineer Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, which resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet.