On Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1969, about 20 people gathered in Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA to watch as two computers passed test data through a 15-foot gray cable.

That was the beginning of the fledgling Arpanet network.

Forty years ago, a focus on developing an community based information sharing network was not created for entertainment or casual study. Instead, APARNET (an acronym for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – ARPA – which originally funded the Internet project) was created in order to support scientific research in the United States.

Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA began tests 40 years ago this Wednesday on what would become the Internet we know today.

“Little did [we] realize what [we] had created,” former UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock said in a school publication celebrating the 30th anniversary of Internet’s creation. “In fact, most of the ARPA-supported researchers were opposed to joining the network for fear that it would enable outsiders to load down their ‘private’ computers.”

Instead the researchers sought to create an open network for exchanging information, an openness that spurred the innovation that would spawn YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web.

Three months after its invention, the ARPANET had expanded to just four sites: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. It would not be until the 1980s that the Internet would truly take off in popularity and commercial use.

ARPANET was a was a test bed for networking research. It involved dedicated communication links, use of IP protocol, special communications processors and participation in this network was initially limited.

It was 30 years ago this year that a grass roots system, USENET, was born which served as a system to exchange bulletin board type

messages and was defined by the sites that wanted to support it. This has grown into the USENET newsgroup communities that have existed ever since.

The Internet didn’t become a household word until the ’90s, though, after a British physicist Tim Berners-Lee  invented the Web (see also: Al Gore) a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations.