Thursday, October 29, 2009

Happy Birthday, Internet

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Forty years ago today, the first message was sent on what would become "the internet."

The year was 1969. It was the years of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The average computer was the size of a Buick. The Department of Defense wanted a way to communicate in realtime across great distances with multiple sites simultaneously. And at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, someone decided they needed something called a "network."

Major communications companies were invited to bid on the project. IBM and Bell both declined. They could see no future in the technology. Finally a small company called BBN Technologies, originally started by two MIT professors as an acoustic consulting company, took the contract.

On October 29, 1969, BBN's creation - the IMP (Interface Message Processors) - used its ultrafast 24 kilobyte core memory and 50 kilobits per second speed as the world's first router. Researchers at UCLA sent the first message to the IMP that night. What was that message? Was it "One small step for man" or "What hath God wrought" like other significant advances in human technology?

No. The first real message sent over the nascent internet was:

LO

The IMP then crashed.

An hour later, the first FULL message sent over the nascent internet was:

LOGIN

It was a bold new world, and to this day the internet continues to crash in millions of places around the world, twenty-four hours a day.

Happy birthday, Internet!

For more information:

Internet Turns 40 Today: First Message Crashed System (National Geographic)

ARPANET (Wikipedia)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

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