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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 29, 1969
Los Angeles, California, USA
57 years ago
ARPANET, the experimental computer network funded by the United States Department of Defense, over which the first message between two distant computers was sent on October 29, 1969.
At about half past ten on the night of October 29, 1969, a twenty-one-year-old student programmer named Charley Kline sat at a terminal in room 3420 of Boelter Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was connected by telephone headset to Bill Duvall, a programmer at the Stanford Research Institute, some 350 miles to the north. Kline's task was to log in to the Stanford machine remotely by typing the word LOGIN, while the two men confirmed each letter by voice.
Kline typed an L. Duvall confirmed that he had it. Kline typed an O, and Duvall had that too. Kline typed a G, and the Stanford computer crashed. The first message ever transmitted across what would become the internet was therefore 'LO.' About an hour later, with the bug fixed, the full login went through. Kline wrote a one-line entry in the lab's logbook, 'Talked to SRI host to host,' and went home. Nobody took a photograph and nobody called a reporter.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Leonard Kleinrock, the UCLA professor whose laboratory hosted the first node of the ARPANET and whose mathematical work on data networks helped lay the foundations of packet switching.
The network had been commissioned by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, itself created in 1958 in the alarm that followed Sputnik. ARPA paid for expensive computers at universities around the country, and each new research group wanted its own. An ARPA official named Bob Taylor, tired of needing a separate terminal in his office for every machine he wanted to reach, proposed linking them so that researchers could share resources. It is often said that the network was built to survive a nuclear attack. That was not its purpose, although the underlying technique owed something to earlier military studies of resilient communications.
That technique was packet switching, developed independently in the early 1960s by Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Britain. Rather than holding open a dedicated line, as a telephone call does, a message is chopped into small packets that travel separately by whatever route is free and are reassembled on arrival. To spare the big host computers the work of routing, the ARPANET used dedicated minicomputers called Interface Message Processors, built by the Massachusetts firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman. The first, the size of a refrigerator, arrived at Kleinrock's lab over the Labor Day weekend of 1969. Stanford's came in October.
By December 1969 the network had four nodes, adding the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Electronic mail, introduced by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 along with the @ sign in addresses, quickly became its most popular use, to the surprise of its designers. On January 1, 1983, the network switched to a new set of rules called TCP/IP, designed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn to let separate networks interconnect, and that date is often given as the birth of the internet proper. The ARPANET itself was shut down in 1990, just as Tim Berners-Lee was building the World Wide Web to run on top of its successor. More than five billion people now use the network that began with two letters and a crash.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The ARPANET was the direct ancestor of the internet. Its technology, its protocols, and many of its people carried over into the global network that now underlies commerce, communication, media, and much of daily life.
It vindicated packet switching. Telephone engineers doubted that a network without dedicated circuits could work. Its success established the method that carries nearly all the world's data today, including voice and video.
It is a model of what patient public research funding can produce. A modest government program with no commercial goal, run by a few dozen researchers given wide freedom, created the foundation for what may be the most valuable infrastructure ever built.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On the night of October 29, 1969, a student in Los Angeles typed two letters to a computer near San Francisco before the connection failed. He fixed it, logged in, made a note in the logbook, and went to bed. It was the first conversation on a network that more than five billion people now use.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“The first message on the internet was 'lo,' as in lo and behold.”
— Leonard Kleinrock, recalling the first ARPANET transmission
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the ARPANET, the first message sent in October 1969, packet switching, the people who built the early network, and how it grew into the internet?
