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National Internet Day is October 29 and looking back at AOL’s quaint “You’ve got mail” ads circa 1997, few could imagine what the internet would mean all these years later. We loved this new thing called “email,” but could we imagine booking entire overseas vacations on our phones at 3am? Or something called Instagram? Or the web’s worldwide implications? Let’s take a moment to look back at how it all happened — and what’s coming next.

October 29, 1969. Charley Kline, a young grad student on the UCLA campus attempts to send the first internet message to his colleague, Bill Duvall, at Stanford. They’re working on something called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the U.S. Defense Department-funded network that connected four terminals installed at UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

 They succeeded — sort of — in their attempt to send the word “LOGIN.”

 Charley Kline: “So I’m on the phone and I type the L and say, ‘OK, I typed in L, you got that?’ Bill Duvall, the guy at Stanford, is watching his monitor and he has the L. I type the O. Got the O. Typed the G. ‘Wait a minute,’ Bill says, ‘my system crashed. I’ll call you back.'” An hour later, under the watchful eye of UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, Kline was able to send the complete “LOGIN” message.

 Another man, a computer scientist named Joseph Licklider, also deserves credit for being an internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. Today he’s known as “computing’s Johnny Appleseed.”

 It’s impossible to calculate the effect of the Internet on society as a whole. That’s like trying to figure out how the telephone and printing press changed the world. We started with chat rooms, email programs, and some basic websites and wound up in the midst of a cultural revolution. Today we’ve got mail — along with access to infinite possibilities — in our back pockets. Literally.

 

 

[Handy Don 14,656]

Wow. Through serendipity, during those early early days, a co-worker deeply connected with folks at MIT, Stanford, and UCLA and got us accounts on the DARPANET and we persuaded our employer to let us link up one of our computers. 

I freely admit that while the cool factor was off the charts I really didn’t see it at all for what it would become. I was in the weeds dealing with better point-to-point solutions via redundant routings while people smarter than me (including that co-worker) had long range visions of...the web!

Edited October 29 by Handy Don