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How Britain got its first internet connection (2015)

Peter Kirstein had to overcome various hurdles to connect the UK to the internet, including intransigent governments, dismissive industry and the taxman.

Indeed, its profile had become so prominent that when the Queen opened a building at the Ministry of Defence’s Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern in Worcestershire in 1976 (which had taken over funding the leased line to Oslo), this was accompanied by her inaugurating the connection by sending an email – the first to be sent by a head of state. In their 1975 paper Bob Kahn at Darpa and Vint Cerf at Stanford University made the next vital contribution towards building the internet of today when they formulated the concept of connecting together different network technologies – such as those defined by different computer manufacturers, or designed for different communications media such as cable, satellite link or radio waves – with a common inter-network layer, which would come to be known as TCP/IP. The universal adoption of common protocols that provided useful services like virtual terminal (telnet), file transfer (FTP), directory (LDAP) and email (SMTP) made the internet an invaluable tool for researchers.

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