In September 1969, two computers were linked together for the very first time. A five-metre cable linked the computers, which then proceeded to exchange test data. Four weeks later, two computers established contact over the telephone network, and so the internet was born!

It was on 10th October 1969 that Leonard Kleinrock logged onto a computer in Stanford from his machine in Los Angeles. First he typed an “L”, then an “O” – and both letters actually appeared on the screen in Stanford. Although the system crashed when he typed the letter “G” it did not change the fact that on that October day a new means of communication had been pioneered.

A revolution had been triggered in communications technology, namely the transfer of data via the internet – in those days still known as the ARPANET after the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defence, which financed the net’s development. The military objective was an information network to safeguard the flow of information in the event of a crisis. If an intermediary computer were to fail, then the flow of data would be simply redirected via another computer. Today, over half a billion computers are linked via the internet.

In the autumn of 1969 when the network started out, it comprised just four university computers. At the start of September that year, the first node was a computer belonging to UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles). A computer at the Stanford Research Institute followed on 2nd October. In November, the University of California, Santa Barbara joined in. The network already had 15 nodes in 1971, and a year later a total of 37 computers were involved.

At first, however, the possibilities were modest, since only texts or data could be transferred from one computer to another. And yet one of the data transfer methods would go on to shape a whole generation: in 1971, Ray Tomlinson invented the e-mail, which would come to symbolise a whole new era of communication. The “internet” was finally introduced to the public in 1991. A year later, the triumphant advance of the World Wide Web was under way – 23 years after the first computer flirt.