The Day the Infant Internet Uttered its First Words

Below is a record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET. It took place at 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969. This record is an excerpt from the "IMP Log" that was kept at UCLA. Professor Kleinrock was supervising his student/programmer Charley Kline (CSK) and they set up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to another programmer, Bill Duvall, at the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The transmission itself was simply to "login" to SRI from UCLA. They succeeded in transmitting the "l" and the "o" and then the system crashed! Hence, the first message on the Internet was "lo", as in "lo and behold! They were able to do the full login about an hour later.

 

 

Below, I have reproduced the page with highlights showing the date and the critical entry.

 

Here is a scan of the cover of the UCLA IMP LOG in which the above entry was made: