The Modern Internet Turns 30 Today

Today might be the day that's considered New Year's Day, and where millions of people around the world are recovering from a long night of partying, but it's also the anniversary of when the modern internet was born. 30 years ago today, the ARPANET officially changed to using the Internet Protocol, creating the internet as we know it today.

Of course, the actual internet was said to be born several years earlier in the early 1960s, but the transition from Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol happened on January 1, 1983, and while it may not have been the biggest moment in internet history, it was a key transition that paved the way for today's internet.

The Network Control Protocol had some limitations, including how many computers it could connect together. Back then, the ARPANET only had about 1,000 computers interlinked, but as the years progressed and more computers were being added, admins realized they would need a new protocol to accommodate the much larger and more complicated network.

Vint Cerf is credited with co-designing the TCP/IP protocol with along with Robert Kahn, and the two began working on the new technology ten years before its grand debut. British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee later used the new protocol to host a system of interlinked hypertext documents in 1989, known as the World Wide Web.

Image via Flickr