First ever message to be sent

Something happened when they try to send the first ever messages

Only letter "L" and "O"? How is that even possible?

No fanfare. No cleverly contrived quote for the history books. And yet, at 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 29/10/1969 three months after Neil Armstrong and his famous step, came another giant leap for mankind. Just months after the first manned moon landing, the ARPANET, granddaddy to the World Wide Web, was brought to life with a rather inauspicious first communication: the letters 'L' and 'O'. UCLA grad student Charley Kline had been trying to type 'LOGIN', but the system crashed. About an hour later, he was able to input the full word and connect, via his Sigma 7 mainframe, with a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, 350 miles up the coast. 'It was a room-sized machine with under-floor air conditioning', Kline told OZY, recalling how it had just 128 Kb of memory and 24 Mb of disk space. Creating a computer network was the idea from Bob Taylor. Taylor worked at ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense based in the Pentagon. Launched in 1958, the original mission of ARPA was to prevent the Soviets from springing any more surprises like Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, on an unsuspecting America.

For 10 years, ARPA worked on space travel and ballistic missiles, but after those were reassigned to NASA and the military, its focus shifted to more earthly matters. One was Taylor’s plan to link the computers at various universities doing work for ARPA. To start, ARPA commissioned a set of IMPs, or Interface Message Processors. These primitive routers were installed at UCLA, Stanford, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. Computers were connected to the IMPs, which were connected to one another by telephone lines leased from AT&T.

"L' and 'O' is 'hello' and a more succinct, more powerful, more prophetic message we couldn not have wished for". - Leonard Kleinrock. That is where Charley Kline came in - a 21-year-old who made the improbable communications equivalent of Neil Armstrong and his first steps on the moon. Kline did not realize he was making history. 'I had no expectation that what I was doing that evening would be particularly significant', he said. Fast forward to 1971, and the first-ever email was sent by Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer and programmer for BBN Technologies. By this time the ARPANET connected 15 computers. Tomlinson had the bright idea of using the '@' symbol to separate the name of the addressee from his location. The address for Kline was CSK@UCLA.

Norway was the first country outside the U.S. to join the ARPANET, when the Norwegian Seismic Array got hooked up in 1973. That same year a connection was made to the University of London computer lab, run by Dr. Peter Kirstein. He remembers those early years well. 'Emails did not come to me in London", he said, recalling how he had to connect to USC to read his messages. Rival networks began springing up: MERIT in Michigan, CYCLADES in France, SERCnet in the U.K. But they were not compatible with one another. To solve the problem, ARPA recruited Vinton Cerf as an assistant professor at Stanford who did worked on the ARPANET as a graduate student at UCLA. He came up with a Common Internetwork Protocol, and that is when the Web as we know it began to take shape. Cerf and his description of this protocol, published in December 1974, contains the first use of the word 'Internet'.

Of course, there were lots of snags, and it was not until 1978 that Cerf and the protocol was perfected on the ARPANET. ARPA then spent a few years encouraging all the other networks to adopt it, and it was officially rolled out on 01/01/1983, thus making the ARPANET part of a larger Internet, albeit an infant version. That, laughs Kirstein, "is when the sh*t hit the fan". By 1990, the ARPANET had been superseded by the National Science Foundation at their own network, NSFNET, and was therefore decommissioned. But its significance as the Internet trailblazer will never fade. "I have some regrets", said Charley, now Dr. Charles Kline, a computer consultant who worked for Cisco Systems. He wishes they did built more security into it, for example, and made more money. But what about a bolder first message?

"If you think about it", he said. 'L' and 'O' is "hello" and a more succinct, more powerful, more prophetic message we couldn not have wished for.

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