By Nick Patience
Today, October 20 is the 30th anniversary of the first message sent over the Arpanet, the US government-funded network that eventually became one of the networks comprising the internet. As the internet is primarily a communications medium, we thought it best to mark that as the anniversary, rather than September 2, the day the first node was hooked up to the network. The first message was sent between a computer housed at UCLA and one at Stanford research Institute in northern California. The computers, called Interface Message Processors, (IMPs) were Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputers remodeled by Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc, with 12K of memory, connected with 50 kbps lines from AT&T Corp.
The idea was for the UCLA IMP to send the letters l-o-g and the SRI box to return with I-n to spell ‘login.’ The UCAL machine got as far as l-o before the thing fell over, but crucially those two letters showed up on the monitor at SRI and the first message had been sent. The third node came on line at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) on November 1 and the fourth the following month at the University of Utah. There were 56.2 million hosts at the last count in July, and many, many more users. We, like most other people assume that in this case, turning 30 merely signifies that the net’s just out of diapers, bearing in mind the billions of people around the world who don’t yet have access to the thing.
