California, October 30: Technology stars, pundits, and entrepreneurs have joined the Internet’s father to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his culture-changing child.
“It’s the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke,” said Professor Leonard Kleinrock of the University of California, Los Angeles.
On October 29, 1969 Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to “talk” to one at a research institute.
Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.
US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military.
A key to getting computers to exchange data was breaking digitized information into packets fired between on-demand with no wasting of time, according to Kleinrock.
Engineers began typing “LOG” to log into the distant computer, which crashed after getting the “O.”
“So, the first message was ‘Lo’ as in ‘Lo and behold’,” Kleinrock recounted. “We couldn’t have a better, more succinct first message.”
Kleinrock’s team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on the ARPANET. Computers at two other US universities were added to the network by the end of that year.
At the time US leaders were in a technology race with their Cold War rival Russia.
The National Science Foundation added a series of super computers to the network in the late 1980s, opening the online community to more scientists.
The Internet caught the public’s attention in the form of email systems in workplaces and ignited a “dot-com” industry boom that went bust at the turn of the century.
—–Agencies