PSA: Human Connection and the Invention of the Internet!

Ray Tomlinson holding up his creation, the @ sign, posing for the Guinness World Records.

Computer technology has advanced fast – seventy years ago, a computer was the size of a room and performed only calculations. Now, we carry the largest, most interconnected web of networks and information the world has ever seen within our pockets. Show a smartphone to someone working the Apollo Guidance Computer in the 1950s, and you would cause quite a shock!

The Internet is no different in this regard. The article “How the Internet was Invented” by Ben Tarnoff explains how the invention of the Internet evolved from a military project to the ‘vast and formless’ digital universe of today. To simplify immensely, the Internet began when the US agency ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) wanted to utilize a wireless network to communicate with their wired computer system to serve soldiers on the front lines anywhere in the world. Eventually, in Silicon Valley at a Rossotti’s Alpine Inn in 1976, a protocol was successfully implemented that allowed both wired and wireless networks to communicate.

What happened next?

APRANET - as it was called - was a military creation, and since the USA military was everywhere, the APRANET was designed to run everywhere. APRANET was designed for connection, and this flexible protocol meant that “channels as dissimilar as radio waves and copper telephone lines” could communicate large distances.

Despite this new governmental power, the Internet only took off once the civilian population started using it. Even Don Nielson, one of the original ARPA researchers who first implemented the program in 1976, said, “… [it] was absolutely startling to me: the clamor of wanting to be present in this new world.”

Rossotti’s Alpine Inn

What made the Internet so popular?

The answer is surprisingly simple – emails. In 1972, the first ‘email’ had already been created by a Ray Tomlinson to send messages between computers in the same network. When APRANET was implemented, emails could now be sent across multiple networks, reaching far beyond the closed systems of APRA and its military research based purposes. Fifteen years later, this popular form of sharing information led to people desiring a permanent, simplified ‘space’ for digital information; and thus, the World Wide Web was created.

Why did emails popularize the Internet?

Alongside the APRANET, emails offered something that humans crave on a fundamental level: connection. Emails showed what the Internet could become – a place to communicate, share news, and even make friends with new people. With the creation of the World Wide Web and household laptops, an easily accessible digital space was born for the sole purpose of sharing information and connecting people together; first for scientists and institutions, and then the rest of the world. This space was the World Wide Web, and with it, we had created a seemingly “… boundless, borderless digital universe…”, all just to connect and learn from each other.

Humans are social animals, needing communal connections to survive – look it up, you can die from loneliness! And the Internet provided a new, vast source of connections. Fast paced communication was not new in the 1900s – radios, television, and phones had been around for decades – but the Internet could move far beyond these technologies. APRANET’s seamless transmission of data between networks meant that what medium we communicate with can be as equally huge – audio, visual, textual, even program based. The Internet could connect us in any number of means, and connect with people we did!

The Internet is by no means a utopia place of friendly people all looking to learn from each other – neither is our society, after all. However, the lesson to take away is that between using the APRANET only to fight wars, or making a digital community where we can explore our world and each other, we chose the latter. It is now a place where, among other things, diverse youth voices such as yours truly can gush gleefully about the Internet’s history and human connections.

And really, isn’t that wonderful?

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PSA - Check out the first website ever made!