This transmission marked the University of California as the first “node” of ARPANET, the pioneering network that laid the foundation for the modern Internet.

How did it happen?

A team of computer scientists at UC Boelter Hall, under the leadership of Professor Leonard Kleinrock, has successfully created a network connection, accomplishing a historic event that will have an impact on future generations.

Kleinrock’s team intended to transfer the word “ENTER” to the Stanford Research Institute, a few hundred kilometers to the north. However, the system crashed in the middle of the message, reducing it to the first two letters: “LO”.

These computers had significantly less performance than modern smartphones – 129 KB of RAM and 24 MB of disk space.

The “Jurassic” period of computer science, when great innovations and scientific research, as well as great hackers and pioneers of computer science, laid the foundations of the modern Internet and all the technologies that surround us today. life.

Commenting on the incident, Kleinrock pointed out the unintentional symbolism of the abbreviated message.

We didn’t plan it, but we couldn’t think of a better message: short, powerful, and prophetic.

This first transmission, no matter how brief, was the beginning of a communication network that would later change the world, revolutionizing many fields from science and education to business and personal communication.

How was the internet born?

In 1967, engineer and scientist Lawrence Roberts, as head of the program, began theoretically developing ARPANET using packet switching methods invented by British computer scientist Donald Davis and American Paul Baran.

After the design was completed, ARPA announced a tender for the creation of the system, which was entrusted to the famous BBN technology Bolt, Bèranek and Newman. His companies made fundamental contributions to the birth of the Internet by developing routing, flow control, software and network management.

Lawrence Roberts pioneered the implementation of ARPANET, and in 1968 he asked another scientist and inventor, Leonard Kleinrock, to perform a mathematical modeling of packet-switched network performance, such as “queuing theory”, a branch of research with applications in many fields.

What happened on the evening of October 29, 1969 was the result of intense and painstaking work and gave birth to the world we have today.

As we honor the legacy of that fateful October day, it is worth remembering how simple beginnings at UCLA fueled today’s information-rich world, where trillions of messages are transmitted around the world at incredible speeds every day.