虽然具体诞生日期不详，但是业界普遍认为1969年10月29日是互联网真正开始运作的日子。这一天，计算机科学家雷纳德？克兰罗克带领他的团队亲眼目睹了他们放在加州大学洛杉矶分校实验室的一台电脑跟几百英里外斯坦福研究院的另一台电脑连接并"沟通"的场景。计算机互联网由此诞生。不过这个网络的发展进程最初比较缓慢，12年之后，连接入互联网的电脑还只有213台。到了1985年，有1600万人通过电子邮件互相联系；而到了2001年，随着网络浏览器的出现，使用互联网的人数超过5.13亿。如今，全球互联网用户大约有17亿。40年前，人们绝对想不到互联网会发展到今天的规模；而今天的人们也无法预知未来的互联网会是何种状态。

Its exact date of birth is not quite certain but the general consensus is that October 29, 1969 was when it really started.

On that day, engineer and computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock and his colleagues watched with excitement as a big grey box was delivered to their laboratory at University of California Los Angeles （UCLA）.

The box - the size of a fridge - was then connected with a computer that would make contact with another computer several hundreds miles away at the Stanford Research Institute.

Undergraduate Charley Kline was given the simple job of logging on remotely from UCLA to the SRI machine; his one command was "login".

The first attempt, however, proved too much for the "interface message processor" or IMP for short - the system crashed as young Charley reached the letter "g".

It was a slow build up with, 12 years on, only 213 computers being linked up to the network.

In 1985 things were looking up with 16 million people going on through email.

But it was with the arrival of web browsers that the idea really took off, with more than 513 million people online by 2001.

To date, around 1.7 billion people are connected to the Internet.

And what of the future?

Peter Buckley, author of the Rough Guide to the Internet said "now" is a very exciting time.

"We're on the edge of cloud computing which basically means we're migrating from computer-based programs such as Word and Outlook to Internet-based systems such as googlemail or whoever.

"What it means is that our information is now held in the ether, rather than on the computer. There are security risks of course although the Internet service providers are always working hard to ensure data is protected.

Ruth Barnett, Sky News' Twitter Correspondent says: "It is difficult to predict the future as we have seen so many unexpected innovations already, and surely no one could have realized 40 years ago how substantially it would change the way we live.

"It could become increasingly creative, open and collaborative, or we could become more and more "tethered" to the companies who make the gadgets we use to access it - such as phones or games consoles.

"There'll always be developments hyped as the 'next big thing' from online shopping to Twitter to iPhones. But what I think will endure is the appetite to connect and share information, on the go."