So Microsoft has decided to terminate Skype, the internet telephony company it bought in 2011 for $8.5bn (£6.6bn). Its millions of hapless users are to be herded into Microsoft Teams, a virtual encampment with a brain-dead aesthetic that makes even Zoom look cool. This eventuality had been telegraphed for quite a while but, even so, it comes as a jolt because Skype was a remarkable venture, and its demise closes a chapter of an interesting strand of technological history.
The internet has been around for much longer than most people realise. It goes back to the 1960s and the creation of Arpanet, a military computer network that emerged after the US had its “Sputnik moment” – the awful realisation that the Soviet Union seemed to be racing ahead in the technology stakes. The design of Arpanet’s successor, the internet we use today, started in the early 1970s and it was first switched on in January 1983.
