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How the Queen of England Beat Everyone to the Internet


Peter Kirstein is the man who put the Queen of England on the internet. In 1976.

That's Her Majesty in the photo above, and if the year isn't immediately obvious from the computer terminal she's typing on -- or from her attire -- you can find it on the wall, just to her left, printed on one of the signs trumpeting the arrival of the ARPANET. The date was March 26, 1976, and the ARPANET -- the computer network that eventually morphed into the internet -- had just come to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, a telecommunications research center in Malvern, England. When Roberts decided that the ARPAnet should stretch from the U.S. to Norway and Britain via an existing trans-Atlantic telecommunications link, Kirstein was chosen to facilitate the British connection.

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