Gary L. Thomas: October 2009

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Happy 40th Birthday, Internet!

On October 29, 1969, computers at UCLA and Stanford were connected for the first time. They were the first 2 "hosts" on what would become known as the internet.

' At 10:30 p.m. on October 29, 1969, Charley Kline, one of my programmers, and I sat down and started to log on from UCLA to SRI [Stanford Research Institute]. This was a big event, because it was going to test communication on this first link of the nascent Internet called the Arpanet. Charley was at the keyboard. He did the typing. We had the telephone headset, so we could speak to SRI. All we wanted to do was long on. So Charley typed an L. "You get the L?" "Got the L." "Did you get the O?" "Got the O." Typed the G. "Did you get the G?" And crash! The system went down. That baby crashed. There had been a memory overflow at SRI. We liked that, because it wasn't our machine, and secondly it wasn't the network. That was most important. So the first message wasn't "What hath God wrought?" It wasn't "This is a giant leap for mankind." It even, you know, "Come here, Watson. I need you." Those guys were smart. They had a great message planned ahead of time. They understood the media and PR, and they had the press there. We had nobody-- no camera, no voice recorder, nothing. So the first message ever sent on the Internet was "Lo," as in "Lo and behold." Truth is, we couldn't have created a better, more concise message. It was prophetic. '

-- Leonard Kleinrock (1934-), one of the fathers of the internet.
Quoted in "Feature Shock," article by Debbie Kim in Los Angeles magazine, March 2009