Happy Birthday Internet

Happy Birthday to the Internet, 41 years old today.

The first message transmitted over the ARPANET (the world's first operational packet switching network) was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969. Supervised by Prof. Leonard Kleinrock, Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 Host computer. The message text was the word "login"; the "l" and the "o" letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was "lo". About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full "login".


After 41 years the darn thing still crashes on a regular basis.  So much for progress!