Mon Oct 29, 2007 — by Shira Gregory

Happy 38th birthday, Internet!

Without which you'd be staring at the desk now

On this day in 1969, the first ever computer-to-computer link was estapblished on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.  It was developed by a U.S. Governmental team called DARPA, which sounds just a little too close for comfort to the plotline on Lost.  But it actually stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

Nope, that's still pretty creepy. 

But creepy or not, those brainiancs are indirectly responsible for this website, this tidbit and your reading of it, coming into being. Switchboards, zeros and ones, hell who cares how they did it as long as I can  illegally download what happens next on Battlestar Galactica. Cheers to you, creepy governmental operations, and please keep 'em coming.

Incidentally, the first message was sent at 10:30 PM by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline and supervised by UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock. The message was sent from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The message itself was simply the word "login". The "l" and the "o" transmitted without problem but then the system crashed. Therefore, the first message on the Internet was "Lo". They were able to do the full login about an hour later.

Jump to comments (2)