Single Most Important Event

What was the single most important event of the 20th century, from the standpoint of creating the 21st?

It is, you might say, an arrogant question. How do we measure the importance of, say, the development of antibiotics, beginning with penicillin, against the importance of Hiroshima? How do we measure either of those against the creation of the United Nations, the end of the gold standard for money within and among most nation states, or a thousand other things? How even decide what counts as a "single event"?

But if you were to want an answer despite all objections, I could do worse that to say ...

Probably the rise of the internet. One key moment in this development came on January 1, 1983, when ARPA initiated the TCP/IP protocol suite.

To decode that a bit: ARPA was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, of the US Defense Department. When ARPA started linking computers together, the people working on this naturally called it the ARPANET.

TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, a system developed for allowing reliable, error-checked bytes to run between applications on the different hosts in units called octets (a bundle of eight bytes).

That was the beginning of something big, including your ability to read these words.

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