Birth of the Internet Part One

The internet didn’t start with cat videos or social networks. Rather, it started with fear.

In the 1950s and 60s, the world wasn’t wondering how to share vacation photos online. Nations were preparing for nuclear annihilation. The Cold War loomed large, and both the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a deadly arms race where a single misstep could end civilization. Out of this paranoia emerged something unexpected, the earliest foundations of what we now call the internet.

The Problem: Communication in Crisis

The U.S. military had a terrifying question: How can our forces communicate if nuclear bombs destroy entire cities, including communication hubs?. The traditional model of centralized communication, one command center issuing orders, was fragile. Knock out the center, and the whole system collapses. What was needed was a network without a center, something resilient, flexible, and capable of surviving catastrophic failures.

Enter RAND Corporation, a think tank of big brains tasked with solving big fears. In 1960, one of their researchers, Paul Baran, proposed a radical idea: split communications into tiny pieces (what we now call packets) and scatter them across a decentralized network. Even if parts of the network were destroyed, the information could reroute through surviving nodes.

It wasn’t sexy and wasn’t even called the internet. It was called packet switching.

The Birth of ARPANET

While Baran’s ideas simmered in military circles, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research arm, ARPA (later DARPA), took notice. In 1969, the same year humanity landed on the moon, ARPA launched a project that would change the world: ARPANET. Four locations connected first: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara & University of Utah. The first message sent? “LOGIN.” The system crashed after “LO.” A humble, almost laughable beginning for something destined to swallow the planet.

By the early 1970s, ARPANET connected more universities, allowing researchers to share data, messages, and computing power. This wasn’t about convenience, it was about resilience in the face of disaster. But in the shadows, something else was happening: curiosity. Students and scientists weren’t just sending data, they were also sending jokes, ideas, and eventually… emails. The first spam email would come in 1978. Some things never change afterall.

Beyond the Military

The Cold War’s accidental invention began to drift from generals to geeks. Academic institutions found value in this strange new web of machines. By the 1980s, other networks were forming: Usenet, BITNET, CSNET. They weren’t connected yet, but the seeds were sown. And then came TCP/IP.

In 1983, ARPANET switched to Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol, the standard that allowed different networks to talk to each other. This was the birth of the modern internet. Not as a single network, but as a universe of networks agreeing to play by the same rules. That year, ARPANET split: one half remained military (MILNET), the other purely civilian and academic. The internet, as we now know it, was no longer purely a Cold War tool, it was becoming something bigger, something messier. and something quite unstoppable.

The Web That Wasn’t Yet

Notice there’s no mention yet of websites, browsers, or social media. This was still an internet of the elite researchers, government officials, computer nerds.

But it had begun. In basements, dorm rooms, and military bunkers, the internet’s early adopters were laying tracks for a future no one fully understood.

Next time, we’ll see how this tool for academics and defense escaped into the public and became the World Wide Web.

Next Time: Birth of the Internet Part Two | The Rise of the World Wide Web

The web was meant for scientists. Then came browsers, dot-com booms, and a digital revolution no one could predict.