This Computer Gave Birth to the Internet

It’s 1969. Charles Manson starts a killing rampage, the Mets win the World Series, a man walks on the Moon, Woodstock leaves a generation stoned for years. Also, the Internet was born.

It’s hard to appreciate that this mess of pipes that’s turned all of us into nerds that salivate over videos about the birth of the internet and allowed us to look at the menu before we get to the restaurant all began with the military-sanctioned ARPANET. And ARPANET began with a modest hook-up between two nodes, one at UCLA, the other 300 miles away at Stanford University.

The first of those connections – the Internet’s first router – was the Interface Message Processor. It was paid for by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (the ARPA of ARPANET), built in Cambridge by the communications engineers at BB&N and shipped to UCLA in 1969. (Here is the BBN report describing how to set it all up.)

The big box was packed with a a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer, a power supply, a headset for using the data link as a telephone connection, storage and lots of wires. It was hooked up to a smaller host computer in the same room. Its modem – capable of carrying data at a whopping 50 kilobits per second, or eighty times slower than the FCC’s definition of “Basic Broadband” today – was then connected to a leased telephone line that could transmit directly to the other computer at Stanford.

The BB&N engineers behind the first IMP.

Central to the communication between IMPs and all the other routers that would eventually join it to form the Internet was the brilliant idea of packet switching. Instead of requiring a continuous dedicated connection between two machines, a network that uses packet switching can send data in little packets over multiple routes, and then leave it to the computer on the other end to reassemble the data in the right way. This would give way to TCP/IP, the standard most of the Internet uses to communicate today.

Here, Leonard Kleinrock, who helped develop packet switching with the computer scientist Paul Baran, shows off the “so ugly it’s beautiful” refrigerator-sized router that he oversaw at UCLA. Amazingly, the thing is still hiding inside a small office next to Kleinrock’s, safe from legions of prostrating nerd pilgrims, luddite terrorists, and spies for foreign governments.

The Smithsonian Museum, which didn’t want it when he offered it in 1989, has changed its mind. The Computer History Museum wants it too. Radiohead is probably itching to turn it into some kind of synth.

But Kleinrock wants it to stay at UCLA. It was here, after all, where the computer sent the world’s first-ever “instant message,” on October 29, 1969:

LO

It wasn’t some primitive computer acronym, but the start of the word that would become the machine salutation of cyberspace: “LOGIN.”

A schematic of the first ARPANET connection.

But it didn’t quite work. A few minutes later a bug was fixed, and the login attempt worked and the rest was history. But on that first attempt, the machine up at Stanford received only the letters L, O, and crashed upon reception of the letter ‘G’.

Lo – and behold all of this.

The IMP, in its natural habitat at UCLA. (Photo: Flickr / FastLizard4)

Watch Motherboard’s documentary Free the Network.