They say life begins at forty. As we stand at the cusp of the semantic Web, that adage certainly holds true for the ‘Net. To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Internet, the Computer History Museum brings us an eyewitness account of how it all began.

On the evening of October 29, 1969 the first data travelled between two nodes of the ARPANET, a key ancestor of the Internet. Even more important, this was one of the first big trials of a then-radical idea: Networking computers to each other. The men who symbolically turned the key on the connected world we know today were two young programmers, Charley Kline at UCLA and Bill Duvall at SRI in Northern California, using special equipment made by BBN in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

The men who switched on the Internet didn’t know it would trigger the greatest media revolution since the invention of the Gutenberg press. Remember that as you work on your new media ventures: you never know what revolutions you will trigger.

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