Because no one else has mentioned it, I might as well. Today is the 30th
birthday of the internet. It was exactly today, thirty years ago, in 1969,
that the very first communications between two computers and two router-like
devices occurred, UCLA to Berkely, if I remember correctly.

I unfortunately don't remember the first conversation (it was something like:
"Are you there?"). Regardless of my failing memory, the network connection
only stayed up through the first few words and then promptly crashed.

No one working on the internet (then called ARPANET) had the slightest idea
of what they were doing then would turn out to be what the internet is now.
Indeed, the ARPANET project had to be forced on the unwilling participants.
ARPA had described the project to the various universities and military
facilities that were to be connected as a way of sharing their computers with
one another. The general reaction was, "Hell, no, I don't want anybody else
on my computer. I've got my own fish to fry -- and I don't have enough
resources as it is."

Even after the network was first primitively established, it essentially went
unused for the first several years. Programs written in one place wouldn't
run on someone else's computer -- and even those that did, were slower than
molasses.

But all of that changed with the invention of e-mail and the "@" symbol, an
aspect of ARPANET that was initially completely unimagined by the original
planners. All of a sudden, the network had human value. It wasn't machines
talking to machines that caused the network to be used, as originally
envisioned. It was people talking to other people that generated the first
mini-explosion of use of the ARPANET (which later became NSFNET, which later
became the internet).

You never can tell what will become of small, simple ideas. Sometimes they
even greatly surprise the people who thought them up and implemented them.

Wirt Atmar