Was the internet born in 1969 or in 1983? It all depends on who you talk to.

In 1965, the Advanced Research Projects Agency under the US Department of Defense began work on a system to connect computers. They called the project ARPANET.

On September 2nd 1969, Professor Leonard Kleinrock connected the first two machines. Twenty people watched in a laboratory at the university of California us meaningless data flowed between two computers along a 15 foot grey- cable. For many people, that day marked the birth of today’s Internet.

The next month they sent the first message on the Net to a computer at Stanford university. The message was “lo” . They wanted to send the word “log in” but when they typed “g” the system crashed. In fact the first word was quite appropriate, as a phonetic version of “hello”.

By January 1970 ARPANET linked computers in four American universities, and by the following year they were 23 hosts in the system, connecting different universities and research institutes.

In 1973 Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-¬mail via ARPANET. In the same year it also went international, connecting hosts in England and Norway.

Another landmark was in 1979 when two graduate students at Duke University established the first USENET newsgroups. Users from all over the world joined these discussion groups to talk about the Net, politics, religion and thousands of other subjects.

In 1974 Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf invented a software that allowed ARPANET to connect to other networks using different operating systems. The software, called TCP/IP, became the universal language of the Internet on January 1st, 1983. Some people say that this was the true birth of the Net. More and more networks joined the system and the number of hosts increased dramatically from 10,000 in 1984 to 100,000 in 1987.

In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was the most popular way of browsing the web, and the network was accessible to anyone in the world with a computer. In 1998 the number of hosts reached 1,000,000.

In 1993, Mosaic became available. This was the first graphics-based browser of the type we all use today. The growth rate of the Internet was an incredible 341% and by 1998 there were 30,000 hosts.