40th Birthday of the Internet

When Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message, it was "What hath God wrought." For Alexander Graham Bell it was "Come here, Watson. I need you." Armstrong on the moon referred to a "a giant leap for mankind."

The first internet message was sent 40 years ago on October 29, 1969. According to Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, the fist node of the internet, then referred to as ARPANET, was in UCLA. A second node was established at Stamford. The transmission itself was simply to "login" to the Stamford Research Institute (SRI) from UCLA. The UCLA people succeeded in transmitting the "l" and the "o" and then as they attempted to send the "g," the system crashed. Hence, the first message on the Internet was "lo".

Log entry showing the date and the critical entry.