Wednesday, October 29, 2008

"What hath God wrought"

Today is Wednesday, 29 October 2008.

These words were, of course, not the first transmitted by telegraph, but the most famous, in 1844.

On this date in 1969, at 10.30pm PST, the first message was sent over ARPANET, the direct ancestor of the Internet.

In 1962, the great computing scientist J.C.R. Licklider wrote memos outlining his concept of an “Intergalactic Computer Network”, which outlined what would be implemented as the Internet.

Licklider’s ideas were brought to fruition through ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, thus ARPA Network. The original web was comprised of computers at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Utah.

The first message was sent from UCLA to Stanford. “l” and “o” arrived successfully and then, appropriately and prophetically, the system crashed. Those at Stanford were left in suspense: would the first message be “login” or “lol”? An hour later, “gin” arrived.

Welcome the networked world.

For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET, including a map of the net in 1977.

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