Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 12

A masterpiece of international collaboration, the Internet has its roots in the desire to share computing and information resources and the US Department of Defense's goal of establishing connectivity via computers in the event of a nuclear attack that destroyed telephone systems.

On October 29, 1969, the first message was sent over what would eventually become the Internet. Meant to be the word “login,” the letters “L” and “O” were sent from researchers at UCLA to a team at Stanford. Then the system crashed. (We'll pause while you chuckle about that first crash.)

When it was constructed and deployed, the Internet served as a communication platform for a tightly restricted group of specific users.

With the advent of packet switching—the division of information into smaller blocks to be transmitted and then reassembled, pioneered as a Cold War strategy—that communication became a viable, though intensely limited, reality.