I was (almost, or more or less) there.

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Yes, I've told this story before, though not as a date tie-in.

I was an undergraduate at UCLA through the late 1960s and early 1970s. I attended classes with relative frequency, but much of my time was spent outside, on what is probably still known as Bruin Walk (or in inordinately long political meetings in a building nearby), or by one of the fountains south of that central area where I usually enjoyed eating a sandwich. To get from Bruin Walk to my favorite fountain I'd walk through the campus computer center - totally unaware that it was precisely then that internet history was being made.

I may have been taking just such a walk on this day, in 1969, when, as This Day in Tech History tells us, the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) was delivered, and perhaps also installed, at the computer research lab on campus. Today we'd call that machine a router, though at the time there wasn't much routing to be done - it was still two months before the first message between two distant computers, from UCLA to Stanford, would be sent (and received). At the time I was distinctly aware that history was being made, but I was involved in a very different sort of history, and only much later became aware of the technological developments that had been taking place so close by.

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Go to: How to read a Boidem column.