Happy Birthday: Internet Celebrates Turning 30!

The internet which has revolutionized lives of people on the planet turned 30 years old on Tuesday. The computer network began transforming lives when it completely substituted all existing network systems on 1st of January, 1983. Today, the network allows people to reach anyone on the planet easily and cheaply.

On January 1st thirty years ago, the Arpanet network, that was commissioned by Department of Defence of US switched completely to using IPS (Internet Protocol suite) communications system which to this day is known as the ‘flag day'. On making use of data ‘packet-switching', the technology paved way for World Wide Web.

A look at the history behind the introduction of internet takes us to the beginning of Arpanet network. This was introduced as a military project in late 1960s and was based on designs developed by Donald Davies, a Welsh scientist.

The network was developed at various prestigious American research laboratories and universities. A few of them were Stanford Research Institute and UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles).

It was in 1973 that work on IPS and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) got under way. These networks are powerful and flexible and resulted in changing the very face of mass communications.

The new systems were designed making sure that they were not vulnerable to any kind of failure and they replaced the old Network Control program which was known to be vulnerable. These systems were designed so that attacks on them could not crash them.

It was by January 1 of 1983, that the complete replacement of the old system with newer Internet protocol was done. This was how internet was born.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist then helped in forming the World Wide Web in 1989 by using Internet Protocol to host a system consisting of hypertext documents that are interlinked.