Today is a very special day in tech history, 44 years ago, the Internet was born.

Well, not the internet as we officially know it, but  the precursor to the Internet, ARPANET which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. On that very Wednesday, the first ever computer-to-computer link was established.

ARPANET was a government project. The United States was in the middle of the Cold War and threats of a catastrophic event, like nuclear attack were feared. The government wanted a way to distribute information in the event that a bomb hit an important computer line. Scientists argued that if there were a way to link computers on a network, other systems could keep running even if others had been destroyed. ARPANET also served as a testbed for new technologies, linking many universities and research centers. The first two nodes that formed the ARPANET were at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, followed shortly thereafter by the University of Utah.

Under ARPAnet several major innovations developed: email, the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network (1971); telnet, a remote connection service for controlling a computer (1972); and file transfer protocol (FTP), which allows information to be sent from one computer to another in bulk (1973)

Thanks to ARPANET we can now waste lots of time online shopping, looking at funny memes and creeping on our friends via social media networks. (We can also do lots of amazing things too)

Happy Birthday Internet! We love you!