On this very day 45 years ago, the Internet (originally labelled ARPANET) was created by the U.S. Department of Defence’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. It all started with an operational packet-switching network consisting of just four computer terminals. Today over 271 million domain names exist; the very first one being registered on March 15th 1985 and Intel.com followed closely behind as the 13th oldest domain name, registered on March 25th 1986.
According to the philosopher Peter Singer, ‘the Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world’. So many things we now take for granted are completely dependent on the net. Take the birth of Google and Wikipedia. On September 4th 1998 Google was born and in December 2001 Jimmy Wales made Wikipedia's first test edit ‘Hello, World!’… If you had said half a century ago that it would be possible to have a device in your pocket from which you could access the sum of human knowledge, few would have believed you.
And who can deny the huge impact of email on the way we communicate and do business? The very first of these digital e-messages, which was reportedly sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, was surprisingly unremarkable considering the huge impact email would go on to have. The pioneer describes the test messages as ‘entirely forgettable… most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar’. Despite these humble beginnings, it is expected that business email will account for over132 billion emailssent and received per day by the end of 2017 – this is nearly 20 emails per day, for every single person on the planet!
It is technology that has driven this evolution over the last 45 years; Intel’s efforts to ensure Moore’s law stays alive constantly drives the increasing power of Internet devices, which have enabled new realms of discovery, communication and progress across almost every area of life. Since its birth the internet has evolved to connect the globe in many ways.
We’re now excited to be a part of the next stage in the evolution of the Internet, powering the devices that, when connected, form the Internet of Things. By 2020 the installed base of the IoT will exceed 26 billion units worldwide according to Gartner, so in the not too distant future you may be living in a smart, hyper-connected city.
While it’s impossible to predict where the Internet will be in another 45 years, the wealth of innovation we see today gives us a glimpse into the future - from wearable technology to data-centres, progress in smart cities to human health. And to think, it all began with a network of four computer terminals back in 1969.