The First Word Sent Over the Internet Was 'Lo'
The plan was to type 'login' between two computers. The system crashed after the second letter.
At 10:30 pm on October 29, 1969, a UCLA grad student named Charley Kline sat down at a teletype connected to a refrigerator-sized computer in Leonard Kleinrock's lab. The other end of the line was an SDS Sigma 7 at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, more than 300 miles away. Kline's job was to log into it.
He and the SRI operator stayed on a parallel voice phone call, narrating the bytes as they went. Kline typed 'l' and asked over the phone, 'did you get the l?' 'Got the l,' came the reply. He typed 'o.' 'Got the o.' He typed 'g.' The receiving system promptly crashed.
The crash had a banal cause — a buffer in the SRI host's command interpreter that auto-completed 'login' and choked when it tried to send the rest of the prompt back. But the accident left a clean artifact. The first message ever delivered over what would become the internet was the two letters 'lo,' which Kleinrock has since pointed out is exactly how an ancient bard might have begun an epic.
About an hour later they rebooted SRI and got a full login through. The lab notebook entry is short and unadorned: '22:30. talked to SRI host to host.' That sentence — host to host — is the one that turned out to matter.
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