Internet celebrates 40th birthday: but what date should we be marking?

Matthew Moore is a journalist for The Daily Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk, with a particular interest in the creativity, community and humour of the internet. He has worked at the Telegraph for four years.

Internet's Birth Day

The internet celebrates its birthday today, September 2, with 40 years having passed since the first successful transfer of data between two computers.

The midwives for the modern era of communication were scientists at the University of Los Angeles in California (UCLA), who connected the neighbouring machines with a 15ft grey cable.

The data these early computers exchanged was tiny and meaningless – merely a test message – but it prepared the ground for the inter-university network ARPANET that eventually grew into the internet that is now so indispensable.

But with many vital breakthroughs along the way and several candidates for the title of “inventor of the internet”, there is dispute and uncertainty over whether September 2 is indeed the most appropriate anniversary.

Here is a run down of the internet's "other" birthdays:

Oct 29, 1969
The first time a message was sent between two distant ARPANET computers – from UCLA to a machine based at the Stanford Research Institute. This marked the true launch of the network's packet switching data transfer method, which involved breaking messages down into small "packages" and reassembling them at their destination.

Jan 1, 1983
On this day all computers on the ARPANET network were required to adopt the TCP/IP protocol, the online communication standard that is still used today.

March 1989
Twenty years after the earliest incarnations of the internet emerged, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as an efficient system for posting and accessing information. Berners-Lee, a British scientist based in Cerne, Switzerland, helped create the hypertext-based internet of web pages, links and browsers that is still in use today.

April 1993
The launch of Mosaic, the first web browser to make a real effort at usability, helped popularise the internet. As the forerunner of Netscape Navigator, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the myriad of browsers available today, Mosaic was a crucial step in taking the internet out of the lab and into the home.