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Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever
It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is. (This is only partly a philosophical question: it is also a matter of egos, since several of the people who made key contributions are anxious to claim the credit.) But 29 October 1969 – 40 years ago next week – has a strong claim for being, as Kleinrock puts it today, "the day the infant internet uttered its first words". At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message. Samuel Morse, sending the first telegraph message 125 years previously, chose the portentous phrase: "What hath God wrought?" But Kline's task was to log in remotely from LA to the Stanford machine, and there was no opportunity for portentousness: his instructions were to type the command LOGIN.
Archaeologists teach computers to sort ancient pottery
"On many of the thousands of archaeological sites scattered across the American Southwest, archaeologists will often find broken fragments of pottery known as sherds. Many of these sherds will have designs that can be sorted into previously-defined stylistic categories, called 'types,' that have been correlated with both the general time period they were manufactured and the locations where they were made" Downum said. "These provide archaeologists with critical information about the time a site was occupied, the cultural group with which it was associated and other groups with whom they interacted."
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