Friday, October 29, 2010

Birth of the internet

The internet was originally conceived for the U.S. military as a means of allowing a community of computers to share information over distance. It's generally accepted that its later development was spurred on as much for research purposes as for military applications.

The body in charge of setting up the network was the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1967, ARPA enlisted the help of the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., to design the system. Within a year, Stanford researchers had designed a framework, which ARPA contracted out for implementation.

The first two nodes were installed at UCLA and Stanford Research Institute in August of 1969, but it wasn't until two months later that the machines made first contact.

On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 p.m., UCLA engineering professor Leonard Kleinrock and student Charley Kline attempted to send a message from one Honeywell computer to a similar unit 600 kilometres away at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto. The connection speed was 50 kb/s.

The first message was supposed to be the word "login," but the system crashed as they typed in the letter "g." The first message, then, was "lo." Although it was a bumpy – if not prophetic – beginning, the researchers were able to complete the message one hour later.

And so the ARPANET (the term internet was not coined until 1982) was born.
source: cbc

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