"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." - First moon mission.
"Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you." - First phone call.
“What hath God wrought!” - First telegraph message.
And, on October 29, 1969, what was the first word communicated from one computer to another computer across a long network?
This word was communicated from a small unknown lab at UCLA in Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. The computers were the size of a small apartment and had less processing power than your BlackBerry. Yet, the word that will stand up to all those other phrases was .....
"Lo"
Actually, the word was supposed to be "Login," but one of the machines crashed in the middle of the communication. So much for critical moments. The bug was fixed within minutes and the word "Login" was finished.
It is actually hard for us to remember -- or to imagine -- that in those days, computers were not interconnected. We did not have a digital telephone network. (Remember the acoustic coupler?) Computers were generally not even interactive. Most communication was via cards, paper tape, and a few terminals. So, sending a message from one machine to another was pretty radical.
Charley Kline, who was at UCLA, and Bill Duvall, his SRI counterpart, gave a special presentation at the Computer Museum to mark the 40th anniversary. They have a video that describes the moment and shows pictures of the equipment like what they used.
It wasn't exactly and email message. As a matter of fact, I doubt that they even imagined email at the time. But, this is the anniversary of a fundamental building block of what makes email possible. Happy Anniversary.
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