The Internet Turns 40

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first successful transmission of data by what would evolve into the Internet. On October 29, 1969, just a few months after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins returned from the Moon, a grad student by the name of Charley Kline sat at a terminal in UCLA and was going to send the word "login" to another terminal at the Stanford Research Institute. When he hit the letter "G," the system crashed. And there was no Microsoft to blame for buggy software.

It wasn't a very promising project as far as the boys in business went. Dr. Kline observed, "IBM refused to bid, as did AT&T. They both said, 'Can't be done; it's useless.' They saw the future of computing as bigger and bigger mainframes." Then again, Dr. Kline probably didn't realize the potential of that network either. Pioneers rarely understand the complete picture behind their creations. Alexander Graham Bell was convinced that his telephone was such a great invention that someday every town would have one.

That night, the ARPANET had just the two nodes, those at SRI and UCLA. Two others had yet to be added at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. The barbarians on America's East Coast were connected in March 1970. The 'net went international in 1973 when a satellite link added Norway to cyberspace, and then a cable brought it to Britain.

Tomorrow, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meets to advance the use of non-Roman characters in domain names. A huge section of mankind will be able to use their own alphabets in establishing their own websites; about half of Internet users write in non-Roman letters or pictographs. Insiders say it is a mere formality and that just a few technical details need to be addressed.  ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said at a press conference, "This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago."

Forty years ago, things were much less grand. Len Kleinrick, who was also there at the beginning, opined, "We should have prepared a wonderful message. Certainly Samuel Morse did, when he prepared 'What hath God wrought,' a beautiful Biblical quotation. Or Alexander Graham Bell: 'Come here, Watson. I need you.' Or Armstrong up in the moon -- 'a giant leap for mankind.' These guys were smart. They understood public relations. They had quotes ready for history." Instead, the ARPANET team had just "login." It seems appropriate that Providence interrupted and made the first Internet message the simple Biblical word "lo," meaning "look" or "see" or if one prefers "voila." Otherwise, Al Jolson's line from "The Jazz Singer" is apt; "you ain't seen nothing yet."



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