On October 29, 1969, at UCLA, a graduate student named Charley Kline sat at a teletype terminal connected by telephone line to a computer at Stanford Research Institute, 560 kilometers away. He typed the command “LOGIN.” The system crashed after two letters — L and O. The first message ever sent over the ancestor of the internet was “LO.” History has rarely offered a more poetic accident.
The Interface Message Processor
The connection was ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, funded by the US Department of Defense to link university computers into the first wide-area packet-switching network. The key hardware was the Interface Message Processor, or IMP — a ruggedized minicomputer bolted to each host machine, designed by Bolt Beranek and Newman under Larry Roberts’ direction. The plan was to make computers talk to each other through these IMP “post offices,” and on October 29 the UCLA team was to log in remotely to the Stanford computer. Kline’s typed L reached Stanford; then the SRI machine crashed. The first internet packet was thus “L”; the second attempt, an hour later, succeeded: LOGIN.
From Two Nodes to a Network of Everything
By the end of 1969, four universities were connected; by 1971, ARPANET had email; by 1983, it adopted TCP/IP — the protocol suite that January 1 article in this series calls the internet’s true birthday; by 1990 it was dissolved into the civilian NSFNET, and the web (invented 1989, covered in our August 6 entry) carried it to the world. Every packet that flies today — every message, meme and video call — is a descendant of Kline’s crashed login attempt.
The Lesson of ‘LO’
The founders of the internet have told the story a thousand times, always with the same punchline. The network crashed on its first word, and everyone involved considered that a rousing success — because two computers, for the first time, had exchanged a letter. Lo and behold: half a century later, that fragile connection carries the majority of human communication. October 29, 1969 deserves its place in this series as the night the internet said its first word — and the word was “LO.”
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