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Lo and Beholden: The Internet at 40

Posted November 2 by Dave Barnette in Business of Business, Media, Technology

It's been some forty years ago that the Internet was born. Two computers in California—one at UCLA and the other at Stanford Research Institute—were linked and, on October 29, 1969, the first word was uttered across what we would come to know as the Internet. Brief and relatively prophetic, that word was "lo."

Meanwhile, the Internet's users—whether older or younger than the web—have been growing up alongside it. Two MDi team members took a moment on this development's birthday to reflect on some of these changes. Ken Wallace, operations manager, is a little more than a decade younger than the Internet and says its usefulness seemed to keep pace with the changes in his life throughout college and beyond. "Before college," he says, it was a source of "cheap entertainment. Funny videos, instant messaging." By the time Wallace was in college, Auburn University had made e-mail an official form of communication; unofficially, it was a great way to stay in touch with family. Throughout college, this became an increasingly important means of communication, with professors using it more and more. One class on strategic management involved linking via Internet with other classes around the world to give the effect of working in a simulated economy. Now, of course, Wallace finds himself using the Internet on a daily basis in an economy that feels an awful lot like it's being run by college students.

Just across the building, but linked infinitely closer by MDi's intranet and social networking sites is Robbie Byrd, MDi's e-dreamer. As his title would imply, Byrd gets a little more misty-eyed about the advent of the Internet. "Before it," he says, "computers didn't speak to one another. Their one function was to take data, transform it in some way and output it, all in isolation on its own island." Storage space, he recalls, was for decades the slowdown in technological transformation. That fateful day when the two computers in California became fast friends was, he says, the product of an effort to share storage capacity, turning those once-isolated islands of information into a hyper-connected archipelago of on-demand data. "The computer is now a super-compendium of knowledge," he says, "limited only by the imagination of its operator."

As for those operators, Wallace, Byrd and those first users of the Internet all seem to agree that the technology has transformed and elevated its operators. Some of those Twitter and Facebook updates, however, would indicate that the human race hasn't progressed terribly far in 40 years.

There's always that fiftieth birthday.