LO Is the First Internet Message 4 The First Web Page Goes Live in 1990 6 Amazon Reinvents Online Shopping 8 eBay Makes Anyone a Seller and a Buyer 10 Google Becomes a Verb 12 A Dancing Baby Goes Viral 14 Napster Revolutionizes the Music Industry 16 Wikipedia Helps People Share Knowledge 18 Facebook Pioneers Social Media 20 YouTube Makes Sharing Videos Easy 22 The Internet Helps Elect a President 24 Millions Organize on Social Media 26 Fact Sheet 28 Glossary 30 For More Information 31 Index 32 About the Author 32
LO IS THE FIRST INTERNET MESSAGE L O These two little letters were the start of something big They changed the way people communicate work shop play learn and even elect leaders LO was the first message sent over the first computer network That network would become the Internet COMPUTERS IN 1969 Today people carry powerful computers around in their book bags or pockets In 1969 computers were enormous Charley Kline’s computer was approximately the size of a refrigerator It weighed more than 900 pounds 408 kg The host or main computer was much bigger His computer acted like a bridge between the host computer and the one at Stanford It was a few days before Halloween in 1969 Charley Kline was a student at the University of California Los Angeles UCLA He phoned a scientist at the Stanford Research 74 8 Percentage of US homes with Internet access in 2012 up from 18 percent in 1997 A researcher at UCLA sent the first Internet message and a scientist at Stanford Research Institute received it Their computers were hundreds of miles apart These were the first two computers in a network called ARPANET ARPANET would form the backbone of the Internet
Institute hundreds of miles away Both of them were sitting in front of computer terminals Kline typed in a letter L on his keyboard He asked the man on the phone Did you get the L He did No one had sent a message over a computer network before Kline was making history In the late 1960s computers did not ask users to log in with a name and password The computer waited for a command Kline was typing a command L-O-G-I-N He pressed the O key Did you get the O he asked The other man said yes The room and equipment used to send the first Internet message Kline typed a G The computer on the other end crashed Kline did not complete his command Still he and the Stanford scientist had done the important and amazing part They had created the first computer network It was called ARPANET Scientists working for the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA invented ARPANET By 1981 ARPANET connected more than 200 military and university computers During the 1980s and 1990s the network linked with other networks around the world growing into the Internet we know today
