Birth of the Internet

First ARPANET Link Put Into Service: 1969-10-29

ARPANET was an early computer network developed by JCR Licklider, Robert Taylor, and other researchers for the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). It connected a computer at UCLA with a computer at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. In 1973, the US government commissioned Vinton Cerf and Robert E Kahn to create a national computer network for military, governmental, and institutional use. The network used packet-switching, flow-control, and fault-tolerance techniques developed by ARPANET. Historians consider this worldwide network to be the origin of the Internet. (Text retrieved 2010-11-22 from This Day in History: November 21.)

The image above is of the record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET. It took place at 22h30 on 29 October 1969. This record is an excerpt from the IMP Log that was kept at UCLA. Leonard Kleinrock was supervising the student/programmer Charley Kline (CSK) and they set up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The transmission itself was simply to “login” to SRI from UCLA. We succeeded in transmitting the “l” and the “o” and then the system crashed! Hence, the first message on the Internet was “Lo!” They were able to do the full login about an hour later. (Image and text retrieved 2010-11-22 from The Day the Infant Internet Uttered its First Words.)

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