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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.'"
I.e. my guess is with a memory overflow after two characters, the network stack wasn't exactly the fastest thing around.
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Great, I can just imagine all the corny jokes Slashdotters are goin[NO CARRIER]
...that the very first even to occur on the Internet was a **buffer overflow**? Talk about a zero-day exploit.
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"
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.
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Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I thought the first message sent across the internet was FrIsT Ps0T! If it wasn't, it should've been.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
When was the first IP packet sent? Shouldn't that be the birthday of the Internet?
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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.
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.
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