September 1, 1999. Copyright, 1999. Graphic News. All rights reserved

INTERNET HITS 30

LONDON, September 1, Graphic News: IN ITS embryonic form it was an alien species flawed with imperfections.
The creature was the Internet, a powerful force which blossomed over time and was embraced by humans like a God.
The net, now the ultimate information superhighway, celebrates its 30th birthday on September 2 with a special conference at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Attendees will include the pioneers behind the phenomenon who can remember when the net took its first shaky steps and was known as the ARPAnet.
Sponsored by the U.S. governmentÕs Advanced Research Projects Agency, the internet got off the ground in 1969.
A group of scientists at UCLA succeeded in getting one computer to talk to another and hooked up the first four host computers for ARPAnet.
Electronic mail was introduced in 1972 and a rapid explosion in people-to-people traffic occured over the next decade.
In its infancy the net was mainly dominated by scientists and students but by 1989 the number of hosts exceeded 100,000. By the end of 1990 it had tripled to more than 300,000.
Ironically the 20th anniversary of the ARPAnet in 1989 also marked the beginning of its shut down.
FAQ, the acronym for ÒFrequently Asked QuestionsÓ, was coined and Compuserve offered Internet Messaging for the first time. 
While most of us now take the acronym www for granted, few know that the mastermind behind the world wide web was British researcher Tim Berners-Lee.
He came up with a proposal which was effectively the birth certificate for www and invented the phrase itself during a conference in 1990.
By 1996 there were 40 million people connected to the internet which had become so commonplace that people began to work from home.
The net had removed the need to commute to work.
/ENDS.

Sources: Reuters, w3history.org, www.isoc.org/internet/history