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The Internet Turns 40, For a Second Time
sean_nestor writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others — including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team — peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. 'That's the day,' Kleinrock tells The Reg, 'the internet uttered its first words.' ...A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word 'log' — or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the 'log' and SRI would respond with 'in.' But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP. ... 'So the first message was "Lo," as in "Lo and Behold,"' Kleinrock says. 'We couldn't have asked for a better message — and we didn't plan it.'"
Lo, as in "Hello, here I am". I wonder if the internet is developing some kind of AI, after all it's a complex network just like the human brain is.
I.e. my guess is with a memory overflow after two characters, the network stack wasn't exactly the fastest thing around.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Great, I can just imagine all the corny jokes Slashdotters are goin[NO CARRIER]
So from the start, the internet caused computers to crash... seems like a bad omen to me...
Communism will never work. People LIKE to own things.
...that the very first even to occur on the Internet was a **buffer overflow**? Talk about a zero-day exploit.
The first 3 bytes transmitted over what was to become the intarwebs were "log", and already it was porn - scatophilia in that case. Was that a sign or what...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Where you draw the line when really started the internet as we know it? Probably in the next days or years several dates will be claimed as the 40th anniversary of a basic and fundamental moment that we could say as the birth of internet, 1st ping, 1st mail, 1st web, 1st spam, 1st botnet, etc there are a lot of things on which we can draw a line and say that what was before wasnt properly "internet"
What? Did this guy escape from the Jewish Flintstones? :-)
What happened to Bolt, Baranek and Newmann's team? What about Cerf?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
My god, that's more apropos than they could possibly have realized. Things haven't changed since then either.
Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet... others peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes.
That's not such a difficult metaphor to construct. The net was *conceived* when the two nodes came together, just as you and I were *conceived* when two nodes, um, er, yeah. And just like then, nobody knew what the result of coupling of the first Internet nodes would be, if anything.
It was *born* when someone slapped it on the bottom and it did something seen by the people gathered around. You probably went "WAAAA!". The Internet went "LO". Of course "G" caused a fault, because the next letter was supposed to be "L".
So I think it would be fair to say that the world would want to celebrate the "birthday" of the Internet today, October 29, just as the world (or your corner of it) celebrate your birthday on the day you made your emergence into the world.
Celebrating the day the Internet was *conceived*... well, that seems a bit weird.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
ha
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
A 50kbps AT&T pipe
Haha, had to laugh at that phrasing. Although I was around for the era where 50kbps would have qualified as a pipe, by today's standards it is more of a drinking straw... and a really thin one at that!
What, nothing about penis size or how to make money at home? Things really were different back then.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I wonder what sort of sporty two seater the Internet is going to buy for itself. A Miata? Z3? Or is the Internet going to go whole-hog and get a Ferrari?
I would have worked on being able to fit more than 2 characters in memory before I tried to tackle the whole networking thing.
But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP. ... 'So the first message was "Lo," as in "Lo and Behold,
At the time they couldn't fathom anyone needing more than 2 bytes of memory.
And the second message was "Buy cheep c1al!5 now!".
It wasn't caused by two characters, it was caused by the automatic command recognition on the receiving host - typing "LO" listed all the commands that started with those letters, and that caused the overflow.
12:50 - press return.
Someone get Al Gore on the phone, please. He can clear this all up and tell us the very SECOND the intertubes was born.
Your points are only valid if you don't celebrate your own birthday(you didn't begin at that point), anniversaries(surely you meet people before first kisses, first dates, first whatevers) or any other arbitrary dates that humans like to remember.
When someone mentions a baby's first words, does it make you mad because the baby first made sounds leading up to that? You see almost everything in time is anamorphous. What would be a better birthday for a network that the sending of information between two computers? What's your point troll?
So all the porn and penis enlargement advertisements are just the internet's way of handling a mid-life crisis? Can't wait for the hilarity that'll ensue when it goes senile.
When was the first IP packet sent? Shouldn't that be the birthday of the Internet?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP
ok, here goes:
1. Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
2. Does it run Windows 7?
3. Does it run Linux?
4. ???
5. Profit
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Funny.
I thought the internet was not born until January 1, 1981 - the day when the ARPAnet was replaced with today's modern IP addressing. That would make the internet only 18 years old.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Why was this the "birthday" and not when two machines were first connected to eachother?
Considering that an internet is when two NETWORKS are connected together, the event of the first connection between two machines does not qualify.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Only 18 years old? It must be 1999! Forget about buffer overflows, the world is going to end in two months!!
everyday is another shooter.
1>First
2>First1
2> damn
1> N00b
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The 'Internet', in MHO, goes back further.
Did it really start with digital machine communication?
Or did it start when we first learned distanced communication and created the wiring infrastructure that really gave rise to Internet.
What is the oldest form of long distance communication? There's people in Wales that have a whistle language that travels pretty far, I think.
Maybe we should date it to smoke signals?
Drum beats?
Screams?
I get it, it all started when Adam dropped his fig leaf. Eve's first scream. I think I have a jpeg of that. Stupid fig leaf...
ed duval the very last person
We couldn't have asked for a better message and we didn't plan it
That's funny, since one of the guys who was working on it was just on NPR talking about how all these other historical firsts had meaningful or interesting messages, while this one was boring.
Simple. This was not the first time two hosts were connected together via a serial line. If you only cared about that, you'd have to go back a lot farther. Heck, the first modem dates back to 1962. What made the Internet possible was not the notion of having computers that could talk to other computers. The key change that made the Internet possible was the notion of all the computers speaking a single language and having routers that knew how to pass messages on to other routers, eventually to another computer. That was not realized until the first packet was sent on a packet-switched network, which in its most primitive form, occurred on October 29, 1969.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you think the internet's birthay is to day. You got it
if you think is octuber 12, you got it. what's the problem?
Internet is not breathing, just still here
he
please restate bitrate in libraries of congress per hour.
Damn 8-bit machine! (slaps C=64). Can't you even count higher than 18? That's it. I'm upgrading to an Apple IIgs. It's 16 bit - that means it has twice as much power.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
So it's 80 years old now?
...with Professor Kleinrock, the chair of the UCLA group that created the first node. You can find it here.
I really, Really, *really* wish that the first message sent across the internet had been for the purpose of rick-rolling someone. I know that it would've taken a completely weird time-inversion to make that possible, but admit to yourself for just one second: it would've been effing hilarious.
~dijjnn
Conception AND Birth
Call it "First Post" day, almost as important as the first spam, or first dupe, or first goatse...
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, but our buffer overflows are a lot faster and bigger now.
Table-ized A.I.
It's funny, they didn't mention Al Gore was there?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Heck, the first modem dates back to 1962.
Which, coincidentally, is the year of my birth.
Evidence!
Assigning arbitrary dates to mark an amorphous event?
Yeah--I hear daylight savings time is this Sunday...
There's no place like
Isn't 50kbps really, really fast for 1969? I was expecting something more like 1200 baud at most. I remember how big a deal it was in the late 1980s that my 2400 baud modem supported MNP level 5 (compression and error correction), and then lusting after the 14.4 modems in 1990. I remember an engineer at Loral (defense aerospace contractor) in Akron in 1989 telling me that 56k modems were impossible, and that they couldn't even reliably sustain 56k on the LAN across campus. So I was rather surprised to see this sort of throughput in 1969. What also doesn't make sense is how could they begin to utilize 50kbps when their hardware couldn't even handle 3 bytes of data, or when computers only had 12k of memory? Just doesn't seem accurate.
Better known as 318230.
Funny. I *thought* that date looked familiar...
Four phrases--Black Thursday, Black Friday, then Black Monday, and Black Tuesday--are commonly used to describe this collapse of stock values. All four are appropriate, for the crash was not a one-day affair. The initial crash occurred on Thursday, October 24, 1929, but the catastrophic downturn of Monday, October 28, and Tuesday, October 29, precipitated widespread alarm and the onset of an unprecedented and long-lasting economic depression for the United States and the world.
From stock market crash to Internet in 40 years, then from Internet to LOLcats in another 40. (more or less.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
But after UCLA typed the 'l' and the 'o,' the 'g' caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP.
So the Internets wasn't even 3 characters old and it was already being hacked and DOS'd. So, so lame.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Arpanet is the internet.
Therefore, two computers on the Arpanet is the birth of the internet.
And thus it was said "Lo -- It is a feature, not a bug," and all were pleased.
I was like, this is -really- getting fast now!
This is my sig.
commenced, when the ARPAnet was born, and someone immediately started a query for music by Kenny Loggins
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
True, but irrelevant. The ancestor wondered about the first time two computers were connected, not the first time two computers on Arpanet were connected. Simply dialing in with a modem does not an internet make.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
But hey, facts is facts! and you know it's true! it's on the internet!
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Any reason to have more cake, is a good reason!
thanks for that. I'd forgotten about Scatman John... :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder if he got two 40th's?
and when the New York Mets came into being
Hey guys.. back in the 60s, there were NO modems that you controlled over the serial line. You dialed the phone (by sticking your finger in the dial and spinning it) attached to your DAA and then your modem connected when you pressed the appropriate button. Sometimes you had one of those nifty autodialing machines with the plastic card with holes punched in it. DTMF Touch-Tone(r) dialing? Hah. By the 70s there were acoustic couplers, but still no dialing by computer.
The ARPANET was composed of packet routers called IMPs, and a host-to-host higher layer of software called NCP (Network Control Program). The first messages sent over the ARPANET (between UCLA and SRI) were sent a month before the "lo(gin)" story that's being told here. Ben Barker of BBN and Marty Thrope sent messages between TTYs attached to these IMPs to test them shortly after #2 was plugged in. That didn't involve NCP, but neither did Kline's attempt -- it was just a hack to shove bits across without NCP. (I think NCP was not actually defined until almost a year later.) So if you want to count "long-distance communication between nodes" it was earlier, if you want to count "kludged up host-host" it was 40 years today, and if you want to count "actual ARPANET protocols" we get to have this celebration again in a couple years.
Why not?
You define an internet as two connected networks.
Why are two connected networks not considered one network?
Why is one machine not considered a network?
Why is one machine connected to various peripherals, such as printers, not considered a network?
Since the next message was them trying a second time, the first three letters sent were "LOL"
He's just suffering from the Y2K bug, give him a break.
I think the guy at the store tricked you...'round here 8 bits can count way past 18 - get up to 255 unsigned. Looks like you have about a 4 1/2 bit machine. I'd take it back, and never shop at best buy again.
...no two people are not on fire.
I would train at the JKA Dojo in Santa Monica maybe 20 years ago. Leonard was one of the students. I recall when he was promoted from brown belt to black belt. Shotokan Karate is a very intense discipline.
Nothing like having the crap beat out of me by one of the founders of the Internet...
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Of course, in this historic event, after the buffer overflow at the SRI end, another Internet first occurred: the Sys Admin's pager went off at 3 AM, awakening him with a demand he rush over and fix things. This was the beginning of a glorious future for Sys Admins everywhere.
"You define an internet as two connected networks."
Everybody defines an internet as two connected networks.
"Why are two connected networks not considered one network?"
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're not. It depends on the context. Eg, you can connect an IPX network to an IPv4 network via ethernet. One physical network. Two logical networks.
"Why is one machine not considered a network?"
Because a network has at least two computers, by definition.
"Why is one machine connected to various peripherals, such as printers, not considered a network?"
Sometimes they are. For example, bluetooth gear is considered a Personal Area Network. It largely depends on how the peripherals are connected. Serial, parallel, usb: not a network. Ethernet, wifi, bluetooth: network. Again, it's a common consensus definition thing.