Internet on Locodigital

Sputnik Turns 69: The Beep That Led to ARPA and the Internet

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0300

Today, October 4, 2026, it has been 69 years since an aluminum ball about the size of a small beach ball started beeping over everyone's heads. It had no camera and no sensors, and it did nothing but say "beep". Even so, Sputnik 1 changed US politics, education and technology within a few months — and one of the consequences is the network you are using right now.

What Sputnik 1 was

Sputnik 1 was launched on October 4, 1957, at 19:28 UTC, from Tyuratam in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan (today's Baikonur Cosmodrome). The rocket was a variant of the R-7, the same intercontinental ballistic missile the Soviet Union had been developing. According to NASA and the program's own history, the satellite was an aluminum-alloy sphere 58 cm in diameter and weighing 83.6 kg, with four long antennas sticking out of the body.

Project Gutenberg: how the first ebook appeared in 1971

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

4 July 1971. Michael Hart, a 24-year-old student at the University of Illinois, has just been given access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe — one of the most powerful computers available at the time, connected to ARPAnet, the network that decades later would become the internet. Along with the access came a processing-time credit estimated at a hundred million dollars. What does a student do with that?

Hart came back from the grocery store with a printed copy of the American Declaration of Independence — the one that had been tucked into his shopping bag — and spent the night typing the text into the terminal. Then he sent the file out over the network. It was the first ebook in history. It was also file number 1 of Project Gutenberg, the free digital library Hart would maintain for the next forty years.

Netscape IPO — 31 years since the Big Bang of the commercial internet

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0300

On August 9, 1995, the NASDAQ stock exchange opened with an unusual problem: there were too many buyers for a stock that didn't even trade during the first two hours. Netscape Communications Corporation's shares were offered at $28 — already double the price the banks had originally planned — and when trading finally opened, the stock jumped straight to $71. It closed the day at $58.25, valuing a company that had never turned a profit at more than $2.9 billion.

The GIF turns 39: from CompuServe to today's memes

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0300

On 15 June 1987, a CompuServe programmer named Steve Wilhite published the specification for an image format nobody expected to last decades. The GIF — Graphics Interchange Format — was created to solve a prosaic problem: transmitting colour images over 2,400 bps modems without choking the connection. Today, 39 years on, it is still the lingua franca of memes.

The problem the GIF solved

CompuServe, in 1987, was one of the largest online networks in the United States, long before the web existed. It was a commercial dial-up service — think of a paid proto-internet where people exchanged files and messages through slow terminals.

LAN houses: the room that connected a generation to Counter-Strike

Sun, 17 May 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The internet cafe had a very specific smell. It was CPUs heating up, air conditioning losing a fight against twenty machines running at once, and a pastry being reheated in the microwave behind the counter. You walked in, paid for your hour, picked the least clapped-out machine available and already knew exactly what you were going to open. Today, 17 May, is World Internet Day — and the internet a lot of Brazilians learned to use was that one: shared, noisy, with the ping bouncing around and somebody always shouting "flanker!" from the other side of the room.

The Web free for 33 years: the day CERN gave it all away

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0300

You opened a browser today without thinking about what you were doing. Clicked a link, went to another, went back, opened a tab, closed another. That happened billions of times today across the world — on phones, computers, televisions, fridges. The web has become the air the internet breathes. But on 30 April 1993, it could have taken a completely different path. In a building in Geneva, two directors signed a half-page document that decided nobody would own it. That it would belong to everyone.

Mosaic 1.0: 33 years of the browser that invented the visual web

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0300

Have you ever stopped to think what the internet was like before you could see a photograph inside a page? Before the animated GIF, before the advertising banner, before any inline image on a web page at all? It was 1993, and the World Wide Web that Tim Berners-Lee had created three years earlier was a network of text. Blue underlined links, monospaced fonts, zero images. About as pretty as a medicine leaflet. Exactly 33 years ago, on 22 April 1993, a 21-year-old university student called Marc Andreessen released Mosaic 1.0 — and put an image inside a browser page for the first time. That was the beginning of everything.