Tech Time Warp: Lo! Unto us the Internet is born

Amid all the breaking news this week, the internet celebrated its 55th birthday on Oct. 29. Dive into this milestone and more in this week’s edition of Tech Time Warp.

On Oct. 29, 1969, two computers were first networked to each through the ARPANET, officially known as the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. ARPANET development began in 1966 with initiatives to develop standards including Telnet, file transfer protocol (FTP), and an interface message processor.

The night of the first network connection, programmer Charley Kline, working at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), tried logging in to a mainframe computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Kline started by typing the command LOGIN but only got as far as L-O before SRI programmer Bill Duvall let him know the computer on his end had crashed. As Duvall recently recounted to the BBC, computers at the time expected a connection speed of 10 characters per second, but the ARPANET was transmitting up to 5,000 characters per second. “It was like filling a glass with a fire hose,” Duvall told the BBC. However, he was able to adjust the buffering and rebuild the system within an hour. Then, Kline and Duvall completed a full successful connection later that evening.

As Leonard Kleinrock, director of the ARPANET team at UCLA said, the fact that “Lo” was the first word transmitted online was actually appropriate. “We didn’t plan it, but we couldn’t have come up with a better message: succinct, powerful, and prophetic,” Kleinrock shared during UCLA’s centennial celebration.

Did you enjoy this installation of SmarterMSP’s Tech Time Warp? Check out others here.

Photo: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock