Happy Birthday! Today's Internet Is 40 Years Old

October 29, 2009 10:37AM - The Internet is now 40 years old, with the first long-distance message sent to launch ARPANET on Oct. 29, 1969.
That first ARPANET message traveled 400 miles from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute. ARPANET was started to save the Defense Department money and the initial reactions to the founding of the Internet were negative.

The technology platform that makes possible your reading this sentence is having a birthday Thursday. On October 29, 1969, the Internet was born.

On that date, engineers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) sent a message to their counterparts at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in San Francisco, a distance of about 400 miles. In a modern-era equivalent of the legendary first telephone message -- "Watson, come here" -- an engineer named Charley Kline at UCLA tried to log in remotely.

"L," "O," ...

According to news reports, he first typed in the letter "L" and then, by phone, asked an engineer at SRI if the letter had arrived. When that was confirmed, it was on to
completing the word "log." The arrival of the "O" was also verified by phone, but the system crashed on "G."

The problem was debugged, and now, four decades later, the world has changed.

Even though Oct. 29 is the generally accepted birthday for the Internet, that is subject to some dispute. While it was the date a message was sent from a lab in one city to a lab in another, some people consider Sept. 2 as the birthday. On Sept. 2, 1969, a message was also sent from one computer to another -- a distance of 15 feet inside the UCLA lab