Happy Birthday, ARPANET: The Internet’s Grandfather First Connec

On October 29, 1969, the first successful message was sent over ARPANET. UCLA student Charley Kline transmitted from an SDS Sigma 7 computer to an SDS 940 machine at the Stanford Research Institute. The initial message was inauspicious — the letters “lo” were sent before the machine crashed. The very first message sent over ARPANET was, therefore, “lo,” which means the internet’s grandfather managed to use slang (or at least Orson Scott Card’s version of it) before transmitting an intelligible command. In retrospect, we probably should have interpreted this as an ominous clue.

“It was inadvertent, but it turned out to be prophetic and powerful that the message we delivered was ‘LO,’ as in ‘lo and behold,'” said UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, who was hired to head the project.

The first genuine command transmitted over ARPANET, incidentally, was “login.”

ARPANET was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the forerunner of DARPA today. ARPANET was the ancestor of the modern internet. It was the first packet-switching network to implement the TCP/IP protocol. The TCP/IP protocol was designed to be latency and fault-tolerant in a way that existing telephone networks were not. The major goal of the project was to allow for the more efficient sharing of computer resources. Computers were rarer in the 1960s than they are today, and not everyone who worked on an ARPA project had access to the horsepower they needed. The idea of connecting to a remote machine to tap non-local resources is so common today, it’s difficult to remember there was a time when the feature had to be invented out of whole cloth. Nevertheless, it was.

There’s disagreement over whether ARPANET had a specific goal of robust communication in the face of nuclear war. The RAND corporation has drawn a link between some of the early work it did on packet-switched networks (as opposed to circuit-switched networks) and the comparative robustness of the former. The Internet Society and Charles Herzfeld, former ARPANET director, have both argued that ARPANET was not conceived of as a means of creating a network that would survive a nuclear war. While RAND published some theoretical work on packet-switched networks at the same time researchers were creating what would become part of ARPANET, the two projects were not connected and the two groups were not aware of each other.

The initial proposals for ARPANET were anything but lauded. According to Wikipedia, “Most computer science companies regarded the ARPA proposal as outlandish, and only twelve submitted bids to build a network; of the twelve, ARPA regarded only four as top-rank contractors.” An article at The Conversation makes a similar point.

Predictably, the new network was scarcely used at the beginning. Excluding, in fact, the small circle of people directly involved in the project, a much larger crowd of potential users (e.g. graduate students, researchers and the many more who might have benefited from it) seemed wholly uninterested in using the ARPANET. The only thing that kept the network going in those early months was people changing jobs. In fact, when researchers relocated to one of the other network sites – for instance from UCLA to Stanford – then, and only then, the usage of those sites’ resources increased.

It’s easy to look back today and see the modern internet as the inevitable result of technological progress. It wasn’t. It was a slow process of creating communication protocols to bridge the gaps between incompatible systems and to develop common languages and approaches to communication challenges, all done with a fraction of the computing power available in a modern smartphone. The initial four locations connected to ARPANET were UCLA, Stanford’s Augmentation Research Center, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah School of Computing. From there, it extended to Massachusetts. By 1981, the network had grown to 213 machines.

ARPANET was formally shut down in 1990, succeeded by the internet. Upon its decommissioning, Vint Cerf, the architect of TCP/IP, wrote the following lament:

It was the first, and being first, was best,but now we lay it down to ever rest.Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.For auld lang syne, for love, for years and yearsof faithful service, duty done, I weep.Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.

Requiescat in Packet, ARPANET. And happy birthday. Your grandkid is kind of a big deal.

Top image credit: DARPA