UPE 2014

THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNET: A HISTORICAL FEAT

In 1969 the world had its eyes turned to what was undoubtedly to become a historical feat: the first human being setting foot on the moon. However, in that same year something else of much importance was happening as well: the Internet was coming into being.

Usually when we think of a historical feat, we think of something big, like the first voyage to the moon. But more often than not, we find that the most meaningful events in history spring from what is

INGLÊS

viewed in their time as an unimportant fact. A case in point is exactly what the figure above represents: the birth of the Internet.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the Internet was born. The World Wide Web is indeed the result of a number of interrelated events that can be traced back to the first artificial satellite – the Russian (then Soviet) Sputnik – being put into orbit around the earth back in the 1950’s. But it was in l969 that “… four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground”. The diagram above shows the first four places ever linked via the Internet which was then called the ARPANET. They are US organizations: the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Utah (UTAH).

Little by little the Internet started spreading everywhere because of new technological advancements and today it is so important that our lives would not be the same without it. Of course going to the moon was an extremely important event as well, a real historical feat, but the birth of the Internet has proved to be the most significant historical fact, and feat, in the recent past of the history of mankind.

(MITRANO-NETO, N; LOUREIRO, M; ANTUNES, Alice M. Insight. Richmond Publishing Editora. São Paulo, 2004. Adaptado.)