14 DAY TRIAL // Happy Birthday, dear Internet, the one thing that keeps most of us going every day!
October 29, if you haven’t marked it up in your calendar, is the International Internet Day, which has been famously celebrated since 2005. There haven’t been too many celebrations since it was first established, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any reason to disregard the event.
Back in 1969, on October 29, the very first electronic message was sent from a computer in the science department at UCLA to another computer at the Stanford Research Institute. The transmission wasn’t an extremely complicated one, but simply told the recipient to login to SRI. Well, out of the “login” word, only the first two letters were actually sent before the system crashed. The full login took place without a hitch about an hour later.
“All we wanted to do… was to send a simple login capability from UCLA to SRI. We just wanted to log into the SRI machine from UCLA,” said Leonard Kleinrock, Computer Science professor.
Back then, the Internet wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is right now, and it took us a long time to reach the current point. Even so, it’s impossible not to notice how far it has all come. From having a network that could barely send a few letters at a time to one that is used by 2.8 billion people, most of which expect for sites and data to be returned to them in the blink of an eye.
The page loading time has turned us all into impatient beings that will huff and puff if anything takes longer than a second.
The Internet has grown into a worldwide service that continues to expand even to remote locations where access has been difficult to obtain up until now. Companies such as Google and Facebook are working to help expand the reach of the Internet to areas where people can’t enjoy having fast access to information.
National Cat Day
By coincidence, today is also the National Cat Day in the United States. Of course, many will say that it was all planned, especially since this new holiday was first celebrated in 2005 too, just like the International Internet day.
Since cats are known for ruling the Internet, it’s only fitting for both of them to be celebrated on the same day. The fact that they were both inaugurated on the same day makes things even funnier.