In What Year Did the First Real Internet Communication Occur?
The ARPANET was the first version of the Internet, a way to send communications from one computer to another within a network. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was known as ARPA and was part of the United States Department of Defense, developed the ARPANET in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the massively connected Internet world of today.
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First Communication
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The first successful host-to-host connection of the ARPA project was made on Oct. 29, 1969, according to the Computer History Museum. A computer at UCLA, which was one of the sites involved in the ARPA work, made the connection with the Stanford Research Institute. The computer was in the lab of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at the university. Charley Kline, a student programmer at UCLA, typed in the first message.
Message Content
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The very first connection crashed the Stanford host after the UCLA team had written only the two letters "L" and "O." The UCLA team had been planning to type "LOG" to log into the Stanford computer, but only got through two letters. For a second message, the connection remained strong and the two computers transferred digital data packets to each other. By the next month, the UCLA and Stanford computers had formed the first permanent ARPANET link.
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Email Origin
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As part of the ARPANET operation, Ray Tomlinson, who was working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a technology company, created email in 1972. Tomlinson wrote the program for e-mail specifically so that it could be used with the ARPANET to send electronic communications among different users. Tomlinson was the developer of the "user@host" format, according to the Computer History Museum. His choice of "@" was selected at random among the symbol keys that were not part of the alphabet.
Public Message
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The ARPANET communications were happening out of the public eye until 1972, when the first public demonstration of the ARPANET occurred and a wide audience first witnessed an ARPANET communication. Larry Roberts and Bob Kahn, who had been working on the ARPANET project, organized that first demonstration, which took place at the International Conference on Computer Communication in Washington, D.C. The demonstration showcased the potential for communications and interactivity between computers, and began to stir interest in ARPANET, according to the Computer History Museum.
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