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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.
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)
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