Evolution of the Internet in Graphics
- December 14th, 2009 7:47 PM
Doug McKechnie, a media producer associate of The Grove, found this original drawing of the internet on Day One. It was December 5, 1969 when the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at U.C.L.A., the Stanford Research Institute, U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
A more recent image is The Grove’s Evolution of the Internet, shown below. We created this for Coopers & Lybrand’s telecoms group in 1995 as a give-away to their clients. One of our forecaster colleagues, Paul Saffo, is fond of siting this story as an example of things taking 30 years to be overnight successes. It’s inspiring for The Grove’s work to realize that was the graphic user interface provided by Mosaic that seemed to be the enabling technology that finally resulted in the hockey stick growth we all experienced in 1993.

