The Internet Turns 40 (for a second time)

sean_nestor writes: Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others — including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team — peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. "That's the day," Kleinrock tells The Reg, "the internet uttered its first words."

A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word "log" — or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the "log" and SRI would respond with "in." But after UCLA typed the "l" and the "o," the "g" caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP.

"So the first message was 'Lo,' as in 'Lo and Behold,'" Kleinrock says. "We couldn't have asked for a better message — and we didn't plan it."