October 29 is a ‘red-letter-day’ in the history of the Internet because it was on this day in 1969 that a part of the first-ever message traveled between two computers that were connected through the ARPANET, the computer network that later took shape as the Internet!

The ARPANET network, funded by the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, comprised four terminals installed at universities and research institutions in California and Utah – along with ULCA and SRI, the other two nodes included University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

For testing the system, the first message, comprising the word “login,” was to be sent between University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Though the system crashed after the first to letters were transmitted; nonetheless, a notable beginning in the electronic dispatch system had been made!

The ARPANET's deployment led to the creation of some other packet-switching networks over the next few years, but most of them were internal networks, with limited accessibility.

In the mid-1970s, engineers hit upon a way to merge networks to create the Internet; and, in 1984, the domain system that included .com, .gov, and .edu was instituted. 

Almost a decade after that, the first commercial web browser, Netscape, became available; and hence, the modern Internet, which most of the users today relate to, came into being in the mid-1990s!