Monday, October 29, 2012

29 October - the day when First Internet Message was sent 40 years ago


Millions of people use internet daily round the clock as easily as drinking a glass of water or peeling of a banana. The use of internet has linked people of the entire world in real time, making the world a global village, interconnected and well linked. People living on extreme ends don’t feel a second’s lag in conversing and communicating with each other. Not only this, millions of pages of useful knowledge get uploaded on the internet for viewing by multiple of millions of viewers.

The IMP Log: The Very First Message Sent on the Internet

But few would know that the journey of internet wasn't that easy. It took “people” years to bring digital data visible to others rather than banking on tele-printers and other devices. Internet was known as ARPANET in 1969, when the first ever message was transmitted over it by Charley Kline, a student-programmer of UCLA, at 10:30 pm on 29th October 1969, just a few months after the first man stepped on the moon. Under the supervision of Professor Leonard Kleinrock, Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 Host computer. The message text was the word "login"; but only the letters “l and o” could be transmitted after which the system crashed.

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The short message was the same as the 12 seconds or so flight time of the first aero plane built by the Wright Brothers in 1903. But as the technology developed, the ideas matured both for aircraft industry and the internet world. Today while we sit on our laptops or desktops and use the internet as easily as anything, the aero planes zoom over our heads, bringing the worlds together, connected and closer.

Shared via Jaho Jalal

Related Reading: History of Internet (Wikipedia)
First message photo by FastLizard4 (Flicker)

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