The first message on the internet's ancestor was 'lo'. Then it crashed.
On 29 October 1969, a UCLA student tried to log in to a computer at Stanford Research Institute over the new ARPANET. He typed 'l', then 'o', and the remote machine crashed. An hour later it worked. And despite a popular story, the network was not built to survive a nuclear war.
The ARPANET grew from frustration. In 1966, Bob Taylor at the US Defense Department's research agency, ARPA, had three terminals in his office, each wired to a different computer, each with its own commands. Building on J. C. R. Licklider's vision of an 'Intergalactic Computer Network', he won a million dollars to link research computers so scientists could share them. Larry Roberts ran the project, and the firm Bolt Beranek and Newman built the routing computers, called Interface Message Processors.
It used packet switching: breaking messages into small blocks that travel independently and are reassembled at the end. Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation had developed a version of the idea in the early 1960s, and Donald Davies at Britain's National Physical Laboratory arrived at it independently in 1965 and coined the term. Roberts later said the networks of the 1970s were similar in nearly all respects to Davies' original design.
The famous first connection came at 10:30 pm on 29 October 1969, between UCLA student Charley Kline and SRI programmer Bill Duvall. The SRI machine crashed after two characters of 'login', so the first letters ever sent across the ARPANET were 'lo'. The network started with four sites and had 213 host computers by 1981. It switched to the TCP/IP protocols on 1 January 1983 and was decommissioned in 1990, by which time the wider internet had taken over.
The nuclear story comes from Baran's RAND work, which did study networks that could survive partial destruction. But ARPA's director at the time, Charles Herzfeld, said plainly that the ARPANET was not built for that; it was about sharing scarce computers. The picture is not entirely simple: in the 1970s, ARPA's leadership did stress military command and control, and the design was naturally robust.
Source: Wikipedia — ARPANET · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
