The Web Awakes

The internet, one of America’s most transformative technological innovations, began as a Cold War-era defense project. In the shadow of Sputnik, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded research into computer networking, guided by a visionary named J.C.R. Licklider who imagined, as early as 1962, a “Galactic Network” of linked machines. On October 29, 1969, a UCLA computer sent the first message over ARPANET to Stanford Research Institute. The message was supposed to be "LOGIN"; the system crashed after two letters.