The Evolution from Net@50 to Net@60
A closer look at the Internet revolution
Earlier this month I released a blog titled, “Net@50: Celebrating the Origin of the Internet,” which details the earliest stages of the Internet. The first Internet transmission occurred on October 29, 1969 between a laboratory located at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International, or SRI).
Although the system crashed shortly after the first transmission began, it sparked a revolution in digital connectivity. After that initial success, SRI continued to work on networking, along with complementary technologies. Douglas Engelbart, the creator of the Augmentation Research Center at SRI, and his group developed innovations such as bitmapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools and precursors to the graphical user interface.
An interesting fact: in his patent application, Engelbart refers to the mouse cursor as an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” It was nicknamed “the mouse” because of the tail that came out from the cursor. The on-screen cursor was originally referred to as a “bug” however the term didn’t become widespread.
