National Internet Day is October 29 and looking back at AOL’s quaint “You’ve got mail” ads circa 1997, few could imagine what the internet would mean all these years later. We loved this new thing called “email,” but could we imagine booking entire overseas vacations on our phones at 3am? Or something called Instagram? Or the web’s worldwide implications? Let’s take a moment to look back at how it all happened — and what’s coming next.
What are National Internet Day Related Holidays?
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Whether it’s a bank account or pics that we should never have taken, our personal life is, well, personal. National Computer Security Day reminds us that although we deserve to have our privacy protected, we can’t only rely on someone else to do the job.![]()
National Download Day celebrates the one week of the year when Americans download the most apps. The main reason? People who receive shiny new smartphones as holiday gifts.![]()
Still using your cat’s name followed by an “&” for your 401(k) account password? Sorry, but that’s just not enough to protect your life savings in 2020. Make sure you add strong authentication to your important passwords in order to prevent identity theft and other cybercrimes.History of National Internet Day
October 29, 1969. Charley Kline, a young grad student on the UCLA campus attempts to send the first internet message to his colleague, Bill Duvall, at Stanford. They’re working on something called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the U.S. Defense Department-funded network that connected four terminals installed at UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
They succeeded — sort of — in their attempt to send the word “LOGIN.”
Charley Kline: “So I’m on the phone and I type the L and say, ‘OK, I typed in L, you got that?’ Bill Duvall, the guy at Stanford, is watching his monitor and he has the L. I type the O. Got the O. Typed the G. ‘Wait a minute,’ Bill says, ‘my system crashed. I’ll call you back.'” An hour later, under the watchful eye of UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, Kline was able to send the complete “LOGIN” message.
Another man, a computer scientist named Joseph Licklider, also deserves credit for being an internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. Today he’s known as “computing’s Johnny Appleseed.”
It’s impossible to calculate the effect of the Internet on society as a whole. That’s like trying to figure out how the telephone and printing press changed the world. We started with chat rooms, email programs, and some basic websites and wound up in the midst of a cultural revolution. Today we’ve got mail — along with access to infinite possibilities — in our back pockets. Literally.
