This series of posts reflects my inner geek.  It chronicles a number of information technology (IT) related “tourist attractions” that I would love to visit before I die.  Some of them are simply far away locations that I dream of making it to and others will be locations that I would need some assistance obtaining access to.  Please feel free to add your own via the comments block below.

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Menlo Park, California is the birthplace of the Internet. This month also marks the 40th birthday for the Internet.  This makes it the perfect place for a geeky tourist excursion!

Wikipedia had a very deep article on this topic.  It reports that:

“After much work, the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA and SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, on October 29, 1969. The ARPANET was one of the "eve" networks of today’s Internet. Following on from the demonstration that packet switching worked on the ARPANET, the British Post Office, Telenet, DATAPAC and TRANSPAC collaborated to create the first international packet-switched network service.”

Both of the first two nodes of the Internet can be found here.  SRI International, founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world’s largest research institutes. The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a research university located in Los Angeles.  If you want to see the plaque, that is shown above, you need to go to Stanford University, where the original messaging structure and packet switching architecture for the ARPANET, predecessor of the Internet, were created.

So where do you want to visit that is related to your interest in The Information Age and Information Technology?  Do you want to see where people worked, like this article, or where objects are?  Together we could make a terrific list.  Please add below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for September 25, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin

Photo credit:  Wikipedia

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