The Internet Turns 40, For a Second Time

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.'"

40 years of 40th birthdays

[gmuslera]

Where you draw the line when really started the internet as we know it? Probably in the next days or years several dates will be claimed as the 40th anniversary of a basic and fundamental moment that we could say as the birth of internet, 1st ping, 1st mail, 1st web, 1st spam, 1st botnet, etc there are a lot of things on which we can draw a line and say that what was before wasnt properly "internet"

Re:Ping Time?

[Burdell]

Well, actually it was the fastest thing around, because it was the only thing around!

Re:What is this Bullshit?

[camperdave]

Why was this the "birthday" and not when two machines were first connected to eachother?

Considering that an internet is when two NETWORKS are connected together, the event of the first connection between two machines does not qualify.

Re:What is this Bullshit?

[dgatwood]

Why was this the "birthday" and not when two machines were first connected to eachother?

Simple. This was not the first time two hosts were connected together via a serial line. If you only cared about that, you'd have to go back a lot farther. Heck, the first modem dates back to 1962. What made the Internet possible was not the notion of having computers that could talk to other computers. The key change that made the Internet possible was the notion of all the computers speaking a single language and having routers that knew how to pass messages on to other routers, eventually to another computer. That was not realized until the first packet was sent on a packet-switched network, which in its most primitive form, occurred on October 29, 1969.