It's a big day in internet history. On October 29, 1969, Professor Len Kleinrock and his team of graduate students at UCLA sent the first message over a network of computers that would eventually become the internet.
As Kleinrock relates in this recent TechCrunch story about how it all happened, the ARPANET was an early network designed for government, industry, and academia to share resources. The literal first message that traveled over this network didn't go exactly as planned:
When my team of graduate students and I sent the first message over the internet on a warm Los Angeles evening in October, 1969, little did we suspect that we were at the start of a worldwide revolution. After we typed the first two letters from our computer room at UCLA, namely, “Lo” for “Login,” the network crashed.
Hence, the first internet message was “Lo” as in “Lo and behold” – inadvertently, we had delivered a message that was succinct, powerful, and prophetic.
What is ARPANET?
ARPANET stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. As discussed, it was a groundbreaking experimental computer network and the direct precursor to what we know today as the internet.
Notably, it was the first wide-area network to use packet switching.
Instead of maintaining a dedicated connection like a phone call, data was broken down into small units called "packets." These packets could travel independently through the network along different paths and be reassembled at the destination. Senior Research Manager Paul Brodsky explains it really well over here.
Initially, ARPANET's goal was to connect computers at different research institutions, allowing them to share resources and collaborate remotely. Over time, ARPANET was instrumental in developing and testing fundamental networking technologies and protocols. Years before your daily Zoom calls, you could call this the experimental foundation upon which the internet was built.
