What historical event fascinates you the most?

The development of ARPANET is what fascinates me the most. Though I wasn’t born yet at the time of its development and launch, I was amazed at how everything came about. I can imagine the amount of brainstorming and research that took place during that time. If not for ARPANET there wouldn’t be an internet right now that we all couldn’t live without anymore.

I thought about this topic because when I was in college, I had a professor whose father was involved in the development of ARPANET and the first email ever sent. I thought it was the coolest thing ever to know someone who knows someone involved in two of the most important historical events of our lifetime, technology-wise. I was nerding out so much that time that I almost asked my professor to ask his father for an autograph. LMAO. As embarrassing as that may sound, it was the honest truth. I was so amazed by the whole thing and still am to this day. Also, grateful for all the smart fellas involved in the development process, and if, it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be enjoying the convenience the internet brings as well as emails.

Imagine the countless hours they’ve put into coding and programming everything. All the debugging that went through. Phew! I don’t miss those days! Or maybe I do. Sometimes. My major used to be programming back in college before switching to something else and I loved it. I could spend hours and hours just sitting in front of my laptop coding my heart away for some school homework or projects and enjoying every minute of it. Even the sometimes annoying debugging where you could spend a serious amount of time figuring out what’s causing the syntax error only to discover that you’re just missing a semicolon! Then, you wonder how could you have missed it! I mean, if you’ve been staring at your laptop writing codes for hours; then of course your eyes would get tired and can easily miss something. Talking about all these made me think of my favorite Dietel books. How can I forget those books, they’re super expensive, 🤣 but worth it though. For me, they are one of the best books for learning coding (C++, Java, C#). I love how it’s detailed and the exercises in the book.

Anyway, back to ARPANET. As I was saying, ARPANET is the reason why we have the internet now and we owe a debt of appreciation to ARPANET’s great pioneers. I can’t imagine life without it now although I’m sure we can all still live without it, right? I mean those of us who enjoyed playing outside, wrote letters by hand, and made shopping trips would be okay without the internet but I’m not so sure about the new generation. They might go into “Ctrl+Alt+Panic” mode. 🤣 As for me, if the internet ever disappears, I would revert to “old school” blogging aka journaling, with a pen and paper, trying to remember what life was like before ‘liking,’ ‘tweeting,’ and ‘gramming’ became our daily workouts. 😁