Who knew that when the United States started testing a communications network in the 1960s to avoid the dangers of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, we would be watching the birth of today’s Internet?! This web woven by supercomputers, cables and servers spread across the planet, a network that currently connects the world, started as a tool that the United States hoped it could help win the silent conflict against Eastern Europe. So, if there’s one thing good that we can say emerged out of the Cold War, that thing was definitely the Internet.
At the time, the North-American nation was afraid that an attack might bring its communications system down and spread the country’s sensitive information, turning the United States into a vulnerable target. It was then that the idea of an invisible web, connected and managed by a backbone computer, would be the perfect solution by allowing the decentralization of the data. In this case, if the Pentagon was hit, the information stored there would not be lost.
Actually, it would never be lost, because this network would be so powerful that it couldn’t be destroyed. Sounds a lot like the current Internet we use every day, right? Of course, at the time, the Pentagon engineers weren’t thinking about the mighty giant this web could turn into. Nevertheless, we are rather thankful because, without the Internet, we couldn’t be publishing this awesome infographic and you wouldn’t be reading this and learning more about the web that links us all.
In the end, the Internet equals knowledge, if you know how to use it. Fortunately, a lot of people do and enjoy the best benefit the Internet can provide: the opportunity to learn in a democratic way. What’s on the Internet is for everybody (well, at least everybody with a connection…).
