Video: 'The Room Where the Internet Began'

(Wednesday, October 29, 1969, 10:30 p.m. PST) — The first connection on what would become the Internet was made tonight when the first message was sent over ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, between computers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

Computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, would recall later that the first message was intended to be transmitting the letters “L-O-G”, after which Stanford would add two more letters to send back the word “LOGIN”.

Video: '40th Anniversary of the Net - October 29, 1969'

Charley Kline, a 21-year old UCLA student, was asked by Kleinrock to help send a message from the university’s SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute’s SDS 940 Host computer.

The UCLA team sent the “L”, then asked over the telephone whether it had been received, then sent the “O”. Before UCLA could transmit the letter “G”, the SRI computer crashed and, as Kleinrock would note later, “History now records how clever we were to send such a prophetic first message, namely ‘Lo.'”

About an hour later, after the programmers repaired the code that caused the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full login.