Motherboard

So on Saturday we were all wearing our Al Gore for President sweatshirts, ready to chomp on balloon cupcakes and get trashed on space beer, when someone texted the party with the suggestion that maybe our Facebook birthday updater had been all wrong. Researchers at Stanford and UCLA started the internet when they sent a Pentagon-funded IM between two fridge-sized computers on October of 1969, not December 5 — that’s just when the first few nodes of the Internet-precursor the ARPANET were linked.

But it’s complicated. Some would argue that it was the fear of the Russians, after their’ launch of Sputnik in October of 1957, that motivated the US government to begin building this decentralized network. Then again, some nitpicking historians claim the Internet was actually born in 1961, when Dr. Leonard Kleinrock first published a paper on packet-switching technology at MIT. It wasn’t until the 1970s that we got e-mail and the beginning ot the transformation of the ARPANET from military experiment to public network.

The first BBS came about in 1978 — the result of a snowed-in programmer who wanted a better way of sharing IBM software — followed shortly by the introduction of real feeling into the internet with the first use of the emoticon (according to Ethan Zuckerman). Others would single out Jan. 1, 1983, when the network switched from Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), essentially the language that enables the Internet’s computers to speak to each other. 1990 was the birth of the World Wide Web, but it was really around 1992 when the internet entered most of our homes — through the mailslot, carried by hundreds if not thousands of terroristic AOL floppy discs.

And this is all if you don’t believe Stanley Kubrick’s implication that the whole thing began in Africa, with a black space monolith.

The video above, by icon designers PICOL, offers a more internationalist conception of the ‘net, with credit to the French scientific network CICLADES network and Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, but no credit to the Russians, who were busy building their own proprietary version of the internet with space-monkeys.

Any way you tweet it, the internet’s old enough to drink, but still not old enough to keep from doing reckless things like killing newspapers or allowing video replies on Youtube.

Your suggestions for the internet’s birthday should go in the internet’s teenage stubble, the comments.