The Internet Turns 40, For a Second Time 152
sean_nestor writes with this excerpt from The Register: "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.'"
Re:Ping Time? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry, but the original Arpanet did not have ICMP or pings. This was years before the invention of IP.
I am not sure if it even used 8-bit ASCII. Many, many systems of that day were 6-bit ASCII (no lower-case letters) or EBCDIC. A "word" could have been 12, 16, 18, 24, 36, or 60 bits. (There were MANY other lengths including 1 and 29, but these were oddities.) Note that most of those were multiples of 6, so 6-bit ASCII was the more common unless it was an IBM Computer. I suspect that this initial use lacked anything that could be called a "protocol stack", but I was still in high school and thought the Arpanet was there so I could play Zork on the ITS systems at MIT, so I am far from sure.
Now, 40 years later, I'm pretty sure I was right about the reason for the Arpanet.
Re:Try 18 years. Re:40 years of 40th birthdays (Score:3, Informative)
Only 18 years old? It must be 1999! Forget about buffer overflows, the world is going to end in two months!!
Re:Honestly... (Score:3, Informative)
As a congressman, his ultimate act was to vote "yes" on the appropriations bill which resulted in it eventually being signed into being.
I suppose you could say he "push-button'd" it into being. If they were using push-button vote tallying at the time...