Technology and media stars, pundits and entrepreneurs joined the internet's father on Thursday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his culture-changing child.

"It's the 40th year since the infant internet first spoke," said University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969.

Kleinrock led an anniversary event at the UCLA campus that blended reminiscence of the internet's past with debate about its future.

"There is going to be an ongoing controversy about where we have been and where we are going," said Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the popular news and blog website that bears her name.

"It is not just about the internet; it is about our times. We are going to need desperately to tap into the better angels of our nature and make our lives not just about ourselves but about our communities and our world."

Huffington was on hand to discuss the power the internet gives to grass roots organizers on a panel with Kleinrock and Social Brain Foundation director Isaac Mao.

"The internet is a democratising element; everyone has an equivalent voice," Kleinrock said. "There is no way back at this point. We can't turn it off. The Internet Age is here."

Part of our lives

Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube that day four decades ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the internet.

"The net is penetrating every aspect of our lives," Kleinrock said to a room of about 200 people and an equal number watching online.

On 29 October 1969 Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to "talk" to one at a research institute.

Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.

US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military's Advanced Research Projects Agency.

ARPANET grew into what is known today as the internet.

› Page 2: Most important innovation since fire

AFP

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