The Room Where the Internet Was Born

A small museum at UCLA’s engineering school celebrates the first host-to-host electronic message and the birth of the network that became today’s Internet.?

On October 29, 1969, graduate student Charley Kline sat in Room 3420 of UCLA’s Boetler Hall and tried to send a five-letter message to a researcher at Stanford University. The message was supposed to read “LOGIN,” but a memory shortage crashed the Stanford computer after it received only the first two letters.?

About an hour later, after additional memory was allocated to the Stanford computer and the respective systems were reconfigured, the UCLA student was able to send the complete message successfully.?

Proof of Concept

At the time, the UCLA and Stanford computers, about the size of refrigerators, were part of the Advanced Research Project Agency Network, which was abbreviated as ARPANET. Development of the network, sponsored by a unit of the U.S. Defense Department, began in 1962 to provide communications capabilities for the U.S. government in case a military attack destroyed the nation’s phone system.?

In 1965, British researchers developed packet switching. The technology, which remains foundational to email messaging, breaks the components of a message into independent segments that take separate routes to their destination before being reassembled. The method protects a message from being lost during network failures or damage.?

Before ARPANET’s development, users could only exchange data between devices built by the same manufacturer. Once computers were connected to ARPANET, they could exchange messages.?

ARPANET originally connected researchers at four universities–UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah–with large routers known as Interface Message Processors. The University of Hawaii was added to the network in 1972. A year later, universities in the United Kingdom and Norway were connected.?

1973 also marked the first transmission of a digital image. With computer science dominated by men, the image, perhaps not surprisingly, was a picture of Swedish model Lena Forsén’s face that had been cropped from a Playboy magazine centerfold. (Although, having worked near IT people at a previous job, a Lord of the Rings character would’ve been another good guess.)

Connecting Diverse Networks

The next Internet development began in the mid-1970s with the invention of the “Transmission Control Protocol” by computer scientist Vinton Cerf. Paired with a similar “Internet Protocol,” the TCP/IP technology allowed computers on different networks to exchange data.?

ARPANET and the Defense Data Network adopted the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, marking the recognized birth of today’s Internet. Throughout the 1980s, the Internet remained an academic tool for exchanging messages, files, and data about ongoing research. ARPANET remained online until being decommissioned in 1989.?

The World Wide Web

In 1991, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN Research Center in Switzerland developed the World Wide Web. Instead of sending files directly, as users did via ARPANET, the web allowed users to post data and files that other users could link to and access directly.?

The following year, University of Illinois researchers developed the Mosaic web browser. The tool allowed regular users to access the web’s files and data easily from any connected device.?

After leaving Illinois, the team developed the commercial Netscape Navigator browser. Within a few years, the dot-com bubble of the late 90s was in full bloom as companies raced to take advantage of the Web’s rapid adoption.?

Dot-coms rose and fell, we got smartphones and tablets, and social networks allowed us to argue with strangers from nearly anywhere.?

And it all started in a UCLA lab.?