A Brief History of the Internet

The first message ever sent across the Internet was "LO."

Not by design. On October 29, 1969, a programmer at UCLA tried to type "LOGIN" to a computer 350 miles away at Stanford. The system crashed after two letters. But those two letters—accidentally perfect—announced something arriving. Something that didn't quite work yet, but would change everything.

The Problem That Started Everything

The Cold War had a strange side effect: it made people think seriously about resilience. What happens when part of your communication system gets destroyed? The military's answer was counterintuitive—instead of building one massive, protected computer, build a network of smaller ones that could talk to each other. If one dies, the others route around it.

ARPANET launched in 1969 with four computers at universities in California and Utah. The insight wasn't the technology—it was the architecture. Distribute the intelligence. Share the load. Survive through multiplicity, not monolithic strength.

The Universal Translator

By the 1970s, different networks couldn't talk to each other. Each spoke its own protocol, like islands of mutually incomprehensible languages.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn solved this with TCP/IP—the rule set that became the universal grammar of digital communication. How to package data. How to address it. How to confirm it arrived intact.

On January 1, 1983, ARPANET switched to TCP/IP. This is the Internet's real birthday—the moment a network became a network of networks. An inter-network. The Internet.

You're using TCP/IP right now. Your phone, your laptop, the servers hosting this page—all speaking a protocol designed in the 1970s. The Internet runs on 50-year-old protocols not despite its scale, but because of it. Universal languages, once adopted, create more value through ubiquity than through optimization.

Making It Human

The Internet existed for two decades before most people knew it was there. Researchers sent email. Universities shared files. But the interface was cryptic commands on black screens—a tool for people who spoke computer.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee was frustrated. Scientists at CERN would email files back and forth, losing track of versions, unable to reference each other's work easily. His solution: documents that could link to other documents. A "web" of connected information. He built the first browser, the first server, the first website.

Then he gave it all away.

That decision—making the Web free for anyone to use and build upon—matters as much as the invention itself. The Internet could have been a garden of walled platforms. Instead, Berners-Lee chose the commons.

The World Wide Web didn't create the Internet. It made the Internet for everyone.

The Boom and What Survived

By the late 1990s, investors were throwing billions at anything with ".com" in the name. The bubble burst in 2000, vaporizing $5 trillion in market value.

But beneath the wreckage, something permanent had emerged. Millions of people had email addresses. They'd bought books online. They'd gotten used to finding information instantly. The infrastructure was real. The habits were real. Only the valuations were fiction.

What survived was what mattered.

Always On, Always There

The early Internet required ritual. You dialed in through your phone line—that screeching handshake as modems negotiated. You "went online" for a session, then logged off. The Internet was a place you visited.

Broadband changed the grammar. Always connected. Always accessible. Then smartphones cut the last tether. When the iPhone launched in 2007, the Internet escaped the desk and fit in your pocket.

The question stopped being "should I go online?" It became "when am I not?"

The Invisible Infrastructure

Today, over 50 billion devices connect to the Internet. Your phone, yes. But also your watch, your car, your doorbell, your thermostat, your medical implants, the sensors in buildings and bridges and farms.

The Internet has become the substrate—the invisible layer everything else runs on. You don't think about it until it stops working. Then you realize how much depends on it. Communication. Commerce. Healthcare. Transportation. Power grids. Financial systems.

We've built a civilization on top of a network that started as four computers passing messages to each other. Netflix streams trillions of hours annually. Video calls connect continents in real time. Entire economies operate online. And underneath it all, packets still find their way from source to destination, routed through a decentralized network that survives because no single point can kill it.

What Hasn't Changed

The Internet is incomprehensibly vast compared to that first "LO" message. But the core insight remains: distribute the intelligence, share the load, route around damage.

No one owns the Internet. No one controls it completely. It's a commons, a shared infrastructure, a network of networks that works because enough people agreed on common protocols and kept building.

The Internet succeeded not because it was perfect, but because it was extensible. TCP/IP was good enough, adopted widely enough, that building on top of it made more sense than replacing it. The Web succeeded because Berners-Lee gave it away. Smartphones succeeded because the infrastructure was already there, waiting.

Each wave of innovation didn't rebuild the foundation—it added another layer. Email. The Web. Broadband. Mobile. Cloud. Each expanded what was possible without destroying what came before.

This is the Internet's deepest lesson: resilient systems survive by adapting, not optimizing. By staying open enough for the next unexpected thing. By choosing protocols that work over platforms that control.

Fifty billion devices. Decades of innovation. Trillions of dollars of economic value. And still, at the bottom, packets finding their way through a distributed network, using protocols designed when four computers was ambitious.

The Internet changed the world. But what made it capable of changing the world was refusing to change its foundation.