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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.'"
...that the very first even to occur on the Internet was a **buffer overflow**? Talk about a zero-day exploit.
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.
Great, I can just imagine all the corny jokes Slashdotters are goin[NO CARRIER]
lo[NO CARRIER]
Ha! Now you'll never know if I was laughing out loud or just correcting you!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Well, actually it was the fastest thing around, because it was the only thing around!
I'm sorry, but the original Arpanet did not have ICMP or pings. This was years before the invention of IP.
I am not sure if it even used 8-bit ASCII. Many, many systems of that day were 6-bit ASCII (no lower-case letters) or EBCDIC. A "word" could have been 12, 16, 18, 24, 36, or 60 bits. (There were MANY other lengths including 1 and 29, but these were oddities.) Note that most of those were multiples of 6, so 6-bit ASCII was the more common unless it was an IBM Computer. I suspect that this initial use lacked anything that could be called a "protocol stack", but I was still in high school and thought the Arpanet was there so I could play Zork on the ITS systems at MIT, so I am far from sure.
Now, 40 years later, I'm pretty sure I was right about the reason for the Arpanet.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
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.
ATDT5601750
(dialtone)..... dee-doo-bee-boop-da-ba-dee-bee.... skeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee skrooooooo....
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Welcome to Slash Dot BBS!
login: commodor
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command (H for help): E
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SUBJ: Huh?
BODY: Hello. Your last message did not come through. All I received was "lo". Was that LOL? Or "lo here come the sheep"? hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. L8r.
command (H for help): S
Message sent. Command (H for help): +++
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