We really can’t live without the internet

The internet came to life 50 years ago this week, with a simple message sent from the University of California, Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed only two characters into the transmission of the word “login”: SRI received only “lo” — “as in ‘lo and behold!’” in the words of UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock. The UCLA terminal operators’ logbook, with its record of “Talked to SRI host to host,” is the internet’s birth certificate.

Five decades later, half the world uses the internet. It took almost the entirety of human existence for half the world’s people to live in cities. It took 27 years for the global population on the internet to grow from less than 1% to more than 50%.