We take it for granted today and it's easy to forget just how new it really is, but the Internet is a very different beast than it was just five years ago. It's now evolving at an amazing pace and soon one third of the world's population will be online. Its beginnings 40 years ago though were a lot more humble.

The actual birth date of the Internet isn't exactly set in stone but one date that is largely regarded as the day it all started is October 29, 1969. Back then computers were the size of rooms and mostly relegated to universities, big companies and military use. And 40 years ago researchers at two universities were trying to connect two of these computers, hundreds of miles away.

This first link was between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the goal of the first test was a very simple one, just logging into the SRI machine. Charley Kline had the task of typing the “login” command. Unfortunately the “interface message processor” crashed on the first attempt and he only got to the 'g' so the first message ever transmitted was “lo.”

This was just the beginning though and a couple of months later the “Internet,” or rather its precursor, Arpanet, reached four nodes as two more universities joined. Twelve years later the number of connected machines jumped to an impressive 213. After that though things started picking up and there was no stopping the phenomenon. By the mid eighties 16 million people were using email but it would be until the early nineties that the Internet as we know it was created with the advent of the World Wide Web followed by the first web browser Netscape.

The Internet boom followed as everyone was suddenly interested in the online landscape. By the year 2000 there were half a billion people using the Internet and the number has more than tripled since. It's hard to find any part of life that hasn't been influenced or affected by the web in some form or another and at the rate at which it is evolving it's hard to predict where it will be in five years’ time, not to mention 40.