BB Video: ARPANET turns 40, and Vintage Computers in Slovenia


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This year marks the 40th anniversary of an important milestone in internet history — the development and successful link of the first host-to-host internet connection.

On April 7 1969, Steve Crocker of UCLA circulated around a memo entitled 'Request for Comments, the first of thousands of "RFCs" documenting the design of ARPANET and the Internet. A few months and many memos and experiments later, in October, 1969, Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANET as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute. Below, a copy of the transmission log.


Boing Boing Video is celebrating internet history in the months to come with a look back at the people, devices, and places that are part of our shared internet history.

In today's episode of the show, we revisit an episode hosted by monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner, in which we explore the "Cyberpipe" museum of internet history in Slovenia, where computers and networking devices from those early years can be found. Cyberpipe is hosting related retro-tech exhibits throughout 2009.

Closer to home for our viewers in the US, the Museum of Computer History in the San Francisco Bay Area offers a world-class repository of exhibits, and their website includes a helpful timeline of key events that led to today's web.


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