38 Years Ago

"Lo."

Simple, but history-making. On Oct. 29, 1969, Computer Science Professor Leonard Kleinrock and his student assistant Charley Kline sent the first "host-to-host" message from an SDS Sigma 7 Host computer at UCLA to an SDS 940 Host computer at the Stanford Research Institute via the precursor of today's Internet, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

Programmers at UCLA — officially the first node on the network — weren't trying to say "hello." They were actually in the middle of sending the message "log" when the connection crashed. But their second attempt at logging on worked.

To find out what Kleinrock, one of the pioneers of the Internet, predicted would happen with this new mode of communication, go to the UCLA History Project.