LO!
It’s Tuesday, October 29, 2019, and you’re reading this blog! Let’s celebrate! This blog would not have been possible without the internet. Today is the 50th anniversary of the birth of the internet. The birth of the internet! So, if you are over 50 years old, then you probably remember a time when you had to go to the library to do your research. You had to use a card catalog to find the book that you were going to look check out. You would then check it out and then read through it, or in some cases, just go straight to the index at the back of the book to find the page that you needed to reference. Then if that reference led to a different book, you had to the library to go through the process all over again!
But, thanks to the internet, you now get to read my blog (and other blogs) and hear my voice (and other’s voices!) You can go to Google or Bing and ask it a question and, boom, get an answer. Or, you could yell, “Hey Siri, how long is a short circuit?” You can play Chinese checkers or Overwatch until four o’clock in the morning, even though you have to go to work in an hour. You can buy Dixie cups three days before you run out and have them delivered two days before you need them! The only thing you can’t do, as far as I am aware, is taste food! With the internet, the potential is limitless. We live in a beautiful age.
Its inception was brilliant. It all began with Robert Taylor, who worked for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as ARPA. ARPA was at the Pentagon, and Taylor was frustrated because he had to communicate with three different computer terminals, which were not small by any means then. But, he was frustrated because he got tired of walking from one terminal to the next terminal to the next terminal to simply send the same message to three different places. So, he had an idea.
His idea was to build a network that allowed him to send one message to three parts of the United States. And so he reached out to UCLA and Stanford to see what they could make. He also reached out to IBM and AT&T. However, IBM and AT&T passed on bidding for this project because they believed that it couldn’t be done. Couldn’t be done?! Right!
And so, Taylor reached out to a small company by the name of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (now known as Raytheon BBN Technologies), who took on the challenge. BBN build four interface message processors (IMP) that were each the size of a gym locker. BBN sent the first IMP to Dr. Kleinrock’s team at UCLA, and it was delivered on August 30, 1969. BBN sent the second to Dr. Douglas Engelbart’s group at Stanford in October. The third IMP went to UC Santa Barbara in November, and the fourth went to the University of Utah in December 1969. These IMPs were the beginning of a new future!
There was no set date when UCLA and Stanford would communicate with each other. They had been trying things out but decided on this random Wednesday to try to get the two IMPs to communicate with each other. So, 50 years ago, today, on October 29, 1969, at 9:30 P.M. Charlie Kline, a student of Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, called Bill Duvall, a fellow programmer at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, and they got to work. There, in room 3420 of Boelter Hall at UCLA, Kline typed out L. Over the phone, Duvall confirmed, yes, he received the L. Then Kline typed out O. Duvall confirmed. Yes, he received it! Then Kline typed out G, and the system crashed. So, the first word ever shared on this new Internet was LO! The most excellent word that began to set our future in motion: LO! Lo and behold, the internet! So, the system crashed, but that didn’t stop them. Kleinrock, Engelbart, and their teams kept working at it, and an hour later, at 10:30 P.M., they got it to work. Kline transmitted the letters LOGIN. Login. That was the day the internet was born. This concept took off, and the rest, as I love to say, is history!
