Important day in history!

Today marks the 41st anniversary of the first time humans had a frustrating interaction with the Internet. CR4 recounts the historic moment: "On October 29, 1969 at 10:30 PM, UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock and graduate student Charley Klein tried to send a message with the word "log" to SRI's Augmentation Research Center. Although programmers at SRI received the letters "lo", the ARPANET connection crashed before the "g" arrived."

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Felton / Moderator

Did they try turning it off and on again?
CANTFIGHTTHEDITE

Voicemail message:

“Yeah, I sent you a message through arpanet, did you read it yet? Just checking, uhhhh… call me back to let me know you read it, okay? Alright, talk to you later, umm, bye.”

So it was also the first voicemail message left to see if someone had checked their email yet.
Anonymous

Funny, and Windows 3.0 was sill 25 years away…..
Anonymous

Thus began the longstanding history of blaming the ISP for a botched e-mail.
eltoozero

This happened because they were sending the ‘login’ command and the receiving system’s autocomplete mechanism tried to fire back ‘gin’ after the sender typed ‘log’. The test was a success, and was one step on the path of getting the growing number of diverse computer systems inter-communicating.

It’s a myth that The Internet was created to withstand nuclear attack, the real story is someone at the pentagon wondered why he needed individual terminals in his office to speak to each different mainframe.

“Where Wizard’s Stay Up Late”, a great book that tells the whole story, includes firsthand accounts of the events in this article.
AdrenalineSleep

LO
AdrenalineSleep

~reboot~

…….L
- dystopianforhire
  
  I see what you did there.
  
  I wonder what spam looked like in 1969?
Anonymous

Lo, and behold.
Anonymous

Even back then AT&T’s network sucked.