The “inventor” of the Internet — Leonard Kleinrock — helped celebrate the 40th Anniversary of his “baby” this week, reminiscing with past and current Web celebrities about the power (and drawbacks) of one of the most transformative inventions in world history.
The Associated Press reports:
Technology stars, pundits, and entrepreneurs joined the Internet’s father on Thursday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his culture-changing child.”It’s the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke,” said University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969. Kleinrock led an anniversary event that blended reminiscence of the Internet’s past with debate about its future.
On October 29, 1969 Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to “talk” to one at a research institute. Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones. US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military.
Watch this related video from AP on the Web’s anniversary: