> the internet started in the 60s (kinda, 1986 definitely)
There are three years you can reasonably point to:
1969 was when the ARPANET project was founded by the DoD. This is the kitchen-sink-historian viewpoint: The ARPANET was the first packet-switched network and was certainly the ancestor of the Internet, but very little specific has carried over into the modern day. The main innovation from this early was packet-switching, or dividing up the message into a lot of little packets that are all individually addressed and can each make their own way to their ultimate destination. This provides reliability, simplicity, and economy compared to the phone system.
1977 was when the first gateway was demonstrated: Specifically, it was the first TCP-based transmission between three dissimilar networks. This is the functionalist viewpoint: Both TCP and the heterogeneous network-of-networks concept are essential to the modern Internet. The network-of-networks concept (implemented by gateways) allows different physical networks to share the same data, for example phone lines and Ethernet cables and WiFi. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) guarantees reliable and in-order transmission of data over unreliable physical networks, mainly by resending packets that got lost. Once you have gateways and TCP, you have the modern Internet. http://www.computerhistory.org/press/30th-anniversary-intern...
1983 was when NCP was ditched for TCP/IP on the ARPANET. This is the most restrictive/pragmatic view: NCP was the underlying protocol suite/software used on the early experimental ARPANET, whereas the TCP/IP protocol suite (as implemented by a lot of different software) is what we use today. NCP was implemented by specialized hardware and would have been prohibitively expensive to replicate anywhere else, whereas the TCP/IP stack has been implemented multiple times for multiple kinds of hardware and on multiple OSes. TCP/IP allowed the Internet to take off.
There are three years you can reasonably point to:
1969 was when the ARPANET project was founded by the DoD. This is the kitchen-sink-historian viewpoint: The ARPANET was the first packet-switched network and was certainly the ancestor of the Internet, but very little specific has carried over into the modern day. The main innovation from this early was packet-switching, or dividing up the message into a lot of little packets that are all individually addressed and can each make their own way to their ultimate destination. This provides reliability, simplicity, and economy compared to the phone system.
1977 was when the first gateway was demonstrated: Specifically, it was the first TCP-based transmission between three dissimilar networks. This is the functionalist viewpoint: Both TCP and the heterogeneous network-of-networks concept are essential to the modern Internet. The network-of-networks concept (implemented by gateways) allows different physical networks to share the same data, for example phone lines and Ethernet cables and WiFi. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) guarantees reliable and in-order transmission of data over unreliable physical networks, mainly by resending packets that got lost. Once you have gateways and TCP, you have the modern Internet. http://www.computerhistory.org/press/30th-anniversary-intern...
1983 was when NCP was ditched for TCP/IP on the ARPANET. This is the most restrictive/pragmatic view: NCP was the underlying protocol suite/software used on the early experimental ARPANET, whereas the TCP/IP protocol suite (as implemented by a lot of different software) is what we use today. NCP was implemented by specialized hardware and would have been prohibitively expensive to replicate anywhere else, whereas the TCP/IP stack has been implemented multiple times for multiple kinds of hardware and on multiple OSes. TCP/IP allowed the Internet to take off.
Hobbs' Internet Timeline is interesting: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/