Todays Internet got started in 1969. Since then the number of users has grown a billion times and it is now critical to the global economy. This growth and dependency have outstripped the original Internets goals and raise major challenges to the growing worldwide demands. At the May 6th SLAC colloquium, physicist Les Cottrell, head of SLAC networking and telecommunications will describe the early Internet and its goals, illustrate how it has grown, and todays major challenges including: security, mobility, bandwidth demands, how to address more than 4.3 Billion devices, and how to redo a functioning network critical to the global economy while it continues to run. He will then provide examples of the impact of the Internet on development, and focus on Africa and how it has lagged the rest of the world in development, why it matters, and how the Internet performance for Africa is improving. Show Partial Abstract