First message sent on internet (Arpanet)- 1969

[GHARIB]

 

October 29, 1969

UCLA student Charley Kline attempts to transmit the text “login” to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute over the first link on the ARPANET, which was the precursor to the modern Internet. After the letters “l” and “o” are sent the system crashed, making the first message ever sent on the Internet “lo”. About an hour later, after recovering from the crash, the full text of “login” is successfully sent.

[RedBaird]

That hardware shown in the video is not the computer, but rather is the "control console" only.

 

 

I was searching for the "first ARPANET-modem", but what I found could be called the first "router".  It is actually an "IMP", an Interface Message Processor, which sent and received packets containing one character of 'payload' at a time.    

 

 

I also found a 10-year-old video of the fortieth anniversary, with two of the people that worked on that first message.

 

 

One said that he had to "rebuild" his operating system after it had crashed when waiting for the 3rd packet, the "G".    I hope that he was able to reload his OS via tape and not punch-cards!  

 

One important topic that they discuss is the development of network communication protocols that could be used between systems made by different companies.  There were no "clones" then. 

 

Below is what a 'part' of a computer system of the time would have looked like.  The rest of the system may have been spread around the room or have been in different rooms.  That fellow seems to be sitting at a teletype machine, as mentioned in the video above.  That is their sure-fire way of keep track of the operator input and output received.  They may have had other means of storing input/output, but getting it onto a screen may have been problematic.

 

 

BTW, if you search for images of the early days of computers, the source may confuse machines of the different eras.  When searching for these images, some pages had images of modern computers in server-racks, as a 'representation' of computers, I guess, but those are far, far from the truths of those early days. 

 

The same sort of thing happens in Hollywood movies, which are infamous for "mixing" together and 'compressing in time' the various articles of Medieval Europe or the Old West in the USA.  They seem to show that Europe went from the Roman Empire directly into 14th century armored knights.  

 

That is also true of the 1930s movies about the Old West, where they show the posse galloping the 10 miles from town to the Widow Jones' ranch.  From our vantage point in time, they weren't that far from the era that they were depicting, yet they showed horses running for miles and miles as if they were motorcycles.   

 

"... they weren't that far from the era that they were depicting,"  Actually, they were as far in time away as we are now from the first ARPANET-messages! 😮  Ha, Ha, the joke is on me!  

[Youp]

Hello friend. 😅