HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO... The Internet!

Apparently so. We remember watching these documentaries and reading these articles when working our way through University and if one thing stood out, it's that we were constantly told "the Internet didn't have one significant start date".

Well sorry University, YOU WERE WRONG!

The BBC have constructed a web timeline illustrating that the Internet was born on August 6th 1991 from a man called Tim Berners-Lee. Which once again is a bit bizarre cause we watched a Google documentary at the weekend which claimed that the "father of the internet" Vince Cerf is working for them. Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee is the mother of the Internet.

It's all very confusing.

Anyhoo we've decided its just better to redo the timeline once more based on our own lives...

August 15th 1996
Wratty uses his Dad's Toshiba laptop with 26kbps PCMCIA Modem and trial account with AOL to download that Friends theme tune. He gave up half an hour later after he realised it was going to take him somewhere between 5 hours and a day.

August 16th 1996
Breasts discovered on Internet.

1998
We get our first PC, a 486 and manage to convince parentals to hook up to the phone line. Large phone bills arrive, PC disconnected. Reconnected again soon when competing Internet companies start to offer cheaper options. We later broke the 100mhz barrier with a new processor.

1999
Wratty starts working at Electronics Boutique and gets NTL round to hook his room up with some TV and a phoneline with their Internet package! No more taking up the parentals phoneline! It was also this year that we discovered Newsgroups and how to download full movies, even though it did take a week. We also acquired more PC technology and climbed to 333mhz processors!

2001
After starting at University and getting re-employed at a new Game store, we made the jump to 512kbps - yes broadband! Movies were all of a sudden becoming a doddle to download, and music was nearly instant! (Instant being about an hour)

2002
Made to jump to 1mb!

2004
Moved house again, got NTL to set us up with their 1mb package, later in the year this became 3mb.

2005
We phoned NTL and told them to get us on this whole 10mb thing. GAME OVER, YEAH is born thus reinventing the Internet and making the original birth worthless.

So in under 10 years we made a massive jump from no internet, to faster internet. We'd never have though in 1996 that we'd have an internet connection as fast as our school's internal network.

It's actually really worth looking at the BBC timeline, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there.
Happy Birthday Internet!