The first message sent over the network that became the internet arrived in Menlo Park 57 years ago this Thursday, and it was only two letters long.
What happened
At 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 29, 1969, UCLA programmer Charley Kline, working under computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, tried to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park over the new ARPANET.
Kline and SRI programmer Bill Duvall talked by telephone as the letters went across. "Did you get the l?" Kline asked. "Got the l," came the reply. The "o" also arrived. When Kline typed the "g," the SRI system crashed, Kleinrock recalled in a 2019 essay for ICANN.
"So, the very first message on the Internet was the prescient word 'lo' (as in, 'lo and behold!')," Kleinrock wrote. The full login worked about an hour later, according to UCLA's record of the event, an entry in its IMP log.
Why SRI was node No. 2
UCLA hosted the network measurement center. SRI was chosen as the second site to provide Doug Engelbart's Human Intellect Augmentation System, the research program behind his 1968 "Mother of All Demos," according to Kleinrock. UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah joined later in 1969, creating a four-node network. By 1972, the ARPANET had grown to 37 computers, SRI says.
Kleinrock noted the irony that the engineers coordinated by telephone to launch packet switching, a technology that would eventually upend the phone network.