46 years ago the first message was sent on the ARPANET network

The event is fixed for centuries



Today is October 29, and everyone can celebrate a non-circular date - the 46th anniversary of the first message sent over the network. It happened on October 29, 1969, and it was then that a data transmission session took place between the computer at the University of California (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Center (SRI). The distance between the two systems, networked, was more than 640 kilometers.



The network itself was formed as part of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) project, about which all readers of Geektimes and Habrahabr have probably heard. Once again, it makes no sense to mention all the details, just to remind you that by 1969 the ARPANET network combined several computer systems at the Stanford Research Center, the University of Utah, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Santa Barbara.



The message was sent from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 system to the SRI SDS 940. The terminals used Honeywell DDP-316 16-bit mini-computers with 12 kibibytes of RAM. DS-0 digital subscriber lines with a capacity of 56 kbps were rented from the AT & T telephone company. The software consisted of IMP - host connections, IMP - IMP - protocol, IMP-sender-IMP-recipient protocol (IMP-s-IMP-r).

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It was originally planned to send a “login” from a computer at the Stanford Research Center to a machine at the University of California. The test task was that the first operator entered the word "LOGIN", which was the login command, and the second had to confirm that he sees it on his screen. Everything worked all at once, and the scientists managed to transfer “l” and “o”, after which a system crash occurred. So the first network message can be considered just “lo”, not “login”. To transfer the entire word, I had to look for the cause of the failure, which took several hours. Only after that was it possible to transmit everything (about an hour later).





Cover of UCLA IMP LOG, journal, in which the record was recorded from the announcement



Well, it remains only to congratulate each other, and be glad that everything turned out just that way. By the way, here you can read about the appearance of the "dark side" of the Internet.