how old is the internet?

Answer 1

SInce 1969 when arapnet was formed.

Commercial internet since 1989 when Al Gore sponsored a bill in congress to form the same.

The roots were earlier
A fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J.C.R. Licklider, articulated the idea in his January 1960 paper, Man-Computer Symbiosis.

"a network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines" which provided "the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions. " -- J.C.R. Licklider [2]
In October 1962, Licklider was appointed head of the United States Department of Defense's DARPA information processing office, and formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. As part of the information processing office's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one for the Multics project SHOPPING at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Licklider's need for inter-networking would be made evident by the problems this caused.

"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.
I said, oh, my goodness gracious me, it's obvious what to do (But I don't want to do it): If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet." -Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with the New York Times

Answer 2

the internet as we know it is only about 12 years old. it however really is about 38 years old!

Got this from answers.com. Hope it's useful.

The Original Internet started in 1969 as the ARPAnet. Funded by the U.S. government, the ARPAnet became a series of high-speed links between major supercomputer sites and educational and research institutions worldwide, although mostly in the U.S. Along the way, it became known as the "Internet" or simply "the Net." By the 1990s, so many networks had become part of it and so much traffic was not educational or pure research that it became obvious that the Internet was on its way to becoming a commercial venture. It Went Commercial in 1995, when it was turned over to large commercial Internet providers (ISPs), such as MCI, Sprint and UUNET, which took responsibility for the backbones and have increasingly enhanced their capacities ever since. Regional ISPs link into these backbones to provide lines for their subscribers, and smaller ISPs hook either directly into the national backbones or into the regional ISPs.

Answer 3

On September 2, 1969 the first communication between two computers in a UCLA engineering lab was brought to life. the little network grow up to be the Internet as we know it.

Answer 4

Apranet started during cold war, which was used by the DoD as a means of communication in the US. Then around 86 the Apranet was introduced to the consumer as "the internet", so about 21 years old..

Answer 5

The internet as we know it started around 1992. But computers were communicating with each other almost from the start.

Answer 6

Younger than Al Gore

Answer 7

Hello World was sent from Berkley to MIT on ARPANET in 1972. The language used was UNIX.

Answer 8

Y0U KN0W..G00D QUESTiON.