Happy birthday internet! As Leonard Kleinrock (computer scientist and internet pioneer) looks back in an email

On September 2, 1969, the birth of the Internet took place (actually in my laboratory at UCLA) when the first packet switch (the IMP) was first connected to the outside world when it attached to my Host computer.

More background in a CNN article on the how and why of the birth of the internet on this day, 55 years ago.

But there was no other computer to talk to. So a month later, Stanford Research Institute received its interface message processor, or IMP, connected it to their host computer, and we created the first piece of the backbone network when a 50-kilobit-per-second line was connected between UCLA and SRI.

There’s even some future gazing that’s pretty accurate if you look at the current situation

It’s always been the goal and desire of we technologists that as we provide capability that computers are good at – number crunching, file storage, massive databases that can be searched – that it would free us up to do the things that humans do so well, like pattern recognition and putting thoughts together, intuition and innovation. […] One of the problems of the Internet is that we didn’t install what I like to call strong user authentication or strong file authentication. We didn’t anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust of all the users.