Celebrations are planned throughout this week to mark the 30th anniversary of the internet. The first international connections to the Arpanet, the predecessor of today’s internet, took place thirty years ago, with the first two countries connected being the UK and Norway. This marked the first non-US connections. The first public showing of the new means of international data transfer took place later in the same year in London
The Arpanet was initially set up to enable American scientists and researchers to exchange data and ideas more easily and before 1973 was an entirely US funded and controlled operation.
It was transformed into an international network in 1973 when the University College London (UCL) and Norway’s National Defence Research Establishment embraced the idea, joining the network by means of dedicated phone lines running at 9.6 kilobits per second.
Later, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee employed the network to host a system of related hypertext data in 1989, to become known as the World Wide Web.