Quick Facts
Stage: First computer-to-computer transfer
When: 22:30, October 29, 1969
Where: Los Angeles – Menlo Park, California
WHO: Graduate student Charlie Cline to computer engineer Bill Duvall
Late one evening, UCLA graduate student Charlie Cline sat in front of computer the size of a refrigerator and sent a “lo” message to a rack of computers run by systems engineer Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), hundreds of miles away.
These two computers were part of a network of four computers that made up the first Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).
idea of computers communicating was part of a grand vision”increase human intelligence“, but ARPANET was ultimately funded for a more practical purpose: to enable the US government to communicate across after a nuclear attack. Although telephone lines will likely remain intact in this case, the main switching centers may be destroyedthe military became worried.
In 1964, RAND Corporation scientists Paul Baran and Sharla Boehm sent out a memo proposing a solution: a “distributed network,” incorporating “hot potato” switching so that no single node was critical to the operation of the system.
From there, the military department financed a project to create such a network. For the system to work, it needed a way to break messages from the sender into smaller pieces, which were then reassembled at the destination. Boehm and Baran modeled this process, which eventually became known as packet switching, using a program written in the computer language Fortran.
However, even before the ARPANET was realized, the scientists involved in the project clearly saw the potential of the concept. Baran, for example, suggested that by the year 2000 people will be able to shop from home using the TV.
In 1968 ARPANET was approvedand by summer, scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara; research institute; UCLA; and the University of Utah began building the infrastructure to allow their computers to communicate using these packages.
For the first transmission, each computer in these locations had a separate “mini-computer” called an interface message processor (IMP), which later evolved into modern routers. IMPs were intended to break messages into smaller pieces and send them to the IMP on the receiving end, which then collected them and reflected them on the receiving terminal.
On that legendary evening when the message was sent, Kline and Duvall were talking on the phone with each other, confirming the time of receipt of each letter. But the system failed because the Stanford computer expected data to be transmitted at a speed of 10 characters per second, while the ARPANET had an unprecedented speed of 5,000 characters per second. According to scientists, this led to an overload of the “buffer” in the Stanford computer. BBC Future.
“It was like filling a glass with a fire hose,” Duvall told BBC Future.
Duvall identified the problem and had the system up and running within an hour.
Almost immediately, researchers realized the system's potential.
“For now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow and become more complex, we are likely to see the proliferation of “computer utilities” that, like the current electric and telephone networks, will serve individual homes and offices across the country.” Leonard Kleinrockthe computer science professor who was in charge of the UCLA node said in a statement at the time.
ARPANET was associated with its military roots until 1981, when the military spun off its own MILNET. And although the term “Internet” was coined in 1970s paper To describe a standardized protocol for sending and receiving data, the Internet itself was not technically born until 1983, when the ARPANET switched to this protocol.
