How it began
At 10:30 p.m. on October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET message was sent from Room 3420 of Boelter Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Stanford Research Institute. Professor Leonard Kleinrock supervised the student programmer Charley Kline at UCLA's SDS Sigma 7 host computer, while Bill Duvall worked the SDS 940 host at SRI, about 350 miles away. The team began to transmit the word LOGIN, and the first message to arrive was "lo." ARPANET was a government-funded research effort.
Before it existed
The reigning switching technology of the 1960s was circuit switching, which suited the long holding times of voice telephone calls. Voice traffic was so dominant, and computer traffic so sparse, that the merit of another approach was hard to see to the established telephone carriers.
How it works
ARPANET was based on packet switching and dynamic resource allocation, with demand access to the network. It allowed remote access to varied applications by multiple users across different computer platforms. The IEEE milestone citation identifies packet switching and demand access as the fundamental differences between the Internet and the earlier circuit-switched networks.
Who pushed back
According to the IEEE milestone record, when packet switching was first suggested the large networking companies considered the technology unworkable and unimportant. It was necessary to overcome their dismissal and develop the technology without their support.
What lasted
The IEEE milestone plaque at UCLA states that the sharing of information digitally from this first node of ARPANET launched the Internet revolution, and that ARPANET formed the foundation of today's Internet. The fiftieth anniversary of the first message was marked in October 2019 by UCLA, the Computer History Museum, the Internet Society and others.
