First ARPANET message, precursor of the Internet

Date

29 October 1969

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

North America (United States)

Era

Contemporary

Significance

On 29 October 1969 the first message was transmitted over the ARPANET, an experimental packet-switched computer network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency.

A team under Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA, with graduate student Charley Kline, sent data to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute; the intended word was 'login', but the system crashed after the letters 'l' and 'o', so the first transmitted message was effectively 'lo'. The connection was completed about an hour later. By the end of 1969 ARPANET linked four nodes, UCLA, SRI, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. Built on Kleinrock's work on packet switching, ARPANET pioneered the decentralised, packet-based networking that underlies modern data communication. It grew over the following years, adopted the TCP/IP protocols in 1983, and evolved into the global Internet, one of the most transformative technologies of the late twentieth century, reshaping commerce, communication, media and society.

Empires active in 29 October 1969

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE to 1991 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE to 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE to 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE to 1999 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE to 1974 CE
• Dutch Empire
  1581 CE to 1975 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Intel Releases the 4004, the First Commercial Microprocessor
  1971
• The Apple II Launches the Personal Computer Era
  1977
• Invention of the integrated circuit
  1958 to 1959
• Invention of the transistor at Bell Labs
  December 1947
• Ray Tomlinson Sends Networked Email and Chooses the @ Symbol
  1971
• IBM Launches the Personal Computer
  1981

Also relevant

• The Discovery Of Oral Rehydration Therapy
  1968

Essential reading

• Apollo 11 Moon landing
  20 July 1969 (mission 16 to 24 July 1969)
• Soweto Uprising Galvanises Anti-Apartheid Struggle
  1976
• Containerisation begins: SS Ideal X first container voyage
  26 April 1956
• Castle Bravo Test and the Nuclearisation of the Pacific
  1 March 1954

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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