Forty years ago, on this day, the Internet came into existence, as two computers in University of California (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute were connected. The inauguration was shaky to say the least. The system crashed as Charley Kline was about to press the letter g of login- the first command.

The beginning of the Internet was cautious and slow. It took a long time for ARPANET to become a truly global Internetwork. Even after ten years there were only 188 computers linked on the network. However, things began to improve in the 80s as computers became (relatively) cheaper and faster. Another, turning point was the development of TCP/IP which went on to become a de-facto standard. By January 1, 1983 all host computers on or connected to ARPANET had switched over to the TCP/IP based Internetwork. Domain name system was created in 1984 and dotcom domain names became available in 1985. By 1987, there were 30,000 host computers and the growth of Internet began to accelerate. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea of Hypertext and developed the World Wide Web. And the rest is history.

[via Guardian and Yahoo]