A nondescript silver delivery van—equipped with a wireless transmitter and carrying a small group of starry-eyed engineers—cruised along the streets of San Francisco. It was November 1977, a time when road trippers used cumbersome foldout paper maps and connecting with a friend meant calling a home phone or sending a snail mail letter. But a transmission sent from inside that van was about to prove that what we now call the internet was possible.
Driving down the road, the van transmitted a message that bounced from California to Boston to Norway to Great Britain, and then back to California through a small town in West Virginia. The message showed that multiple computers in locations around the world could communicate with one another.
Another six years passed, as computer scientists and engineers perfected the ability of computers to send data from one computer to another over telephone lines. In the meantime, personal computers, which were mainly used for their games, word processors, spreadsheets, and data storage, began gaining in popularity.
Then, after much research and careful planning, on January 1, 1983, computer scientists adopted a set of rules that would become the fundamental architecture of the internet. In technical terms, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) made it possible for computers on different networks to “talk” to each other.
An ordinary silver delivery van cruised along the streets of San Francisco. It was equipped with a wireless transmitter and carrying a small group of starry-eyed engineers. It was November 1977. In those days, road trippers used cumbersome foldout paper maps. Connecting with a friend meant calling a home phone or sending a snail mail letter. But a transmission sent from inside that van was about to prove that what we now call the internet was possible.
The van transmitted a message that bounced from California to Boston to Norway to Great Britain, and then back to California through a small town in West Virginia. The message showed that multiple computers in locations around the world could communicate with one another.
Another six years passed. Computer scientists and engineers slowly perfected the ability of computers to send data from one computer to another over telephone lines. In the meantime, personal computers, which were mainly used for their games, word processors, spreadsheets, and data storage, began gaining in popularity.
Then on January 1, 1983, computer scientists adopted a set of rules that would become the fundamental structure of the internet. In technical terms, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) made it possible for computers on different networks to “talk” to each other.