The internet at 40 - where to next?

Forty years ago, on 29 September 1969, a true revolution happened. A computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, was linked to a computer at Stanford 400 miles away.

This really was the start of the internet, and the rest, as they say, is history. The project had started a few years earlier when then-US President Eisenhower, smarting under the successful launch of Russia's Sputnik satellite, decided that American science had to be ramped up.

And the scientists involved, strung across American universities, decided to devise a way for each of them to access the other research computers right across the continent.

They created a network of high-speed cables linking computers, and then devised a way for them to communicate with each other.

So, on 29 September, Professor Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA logged in to the network for the first time as he talked on the phone to a colleague at a computer up the California coast, in Stanford.

First broadcast on Business Daily