A very inauspicious beginning.


I'm not aware of any special celebrations around the event, but it's certainly one that in retrospect has historic significance. It was on this date in 1969 that Charley Kline, a student programmer at UCLA, sent a message to the Stanford Research Institute which is recognized as the first message sent via Arpanet. An NPR broadcast from 2009 brings the recollection of Len Kleinrock who was then the head of the UCLA computing center:
"The first thing I typed was an L," Kline says. Over the phone, Duvall told Kline he had gotten it. "I typed the O, and he got the O."

Then Kline typed the G. "And he had a bug and it crashed."

And that was it. The first-ever communication over a computer network was "lo." The ARPANET was born.
A 2015 PBS report on the same event also quotes Kleinrock, but with an interesting twist:
“If you think about it,” he said. “‘L’ and ‘O’ is ‘hello,’ and a more succinct, more powerful, more prophetic message we couldn’t have wished for.”
That's sort of what's called poetic justice.



Go to: Ain't no need to hide, ain't no need to run.