Happy International Internet Day! October 29 celebrates the creation of the world wide web, which makes it possible for you to be reading this story right now. 45 years ago today, the first ever message was transmitted using the Internet from a computer at UCLA to a computer at Stanford. The significance of this event cannot be overstated; it has had a profound effect on society and the way we live our lives. We've come to depend on the Internet it for everything from communication to research to procrastination. And it all started on October 29, 1969 with one simple word: "login."
On the evening of October 29, UCLA grad student Charley Kline used a SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to try and send a message to Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute. Kline was testing the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet, which connected the two computers. Supervised by computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, Kline began typing the message, but only got to "LO" before the Stanford computer crashed. After Duvall rebooted the system, Kline started the message over again an hour later with "L." So the first three characters sent over the Internet were, fittingly, "LOL." Kline was able to finish the message on his second attempt, and the first transmission between two computers was made.
While it was certainly an exciting accomplishment, the men involved had no idea how important the Internet would become all these years later. ARPANET was originally funded by the US Defense Department with the purpose of helping scientists share their research. It was not initially intended for commercial use.
"When we sent that first message, there weren't any reporters, cameras, tape recorders or scribes to document that major event," Kleinrock said in 2004. "We knew we were creating an important new technology that we expected would be of use to a segment of the population, but we had no idea how truly momentous an event it was."
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