The Internet turns 45 years old

The first message transmitted over the ARPANET was sent on October 29, 1969. Originally a US military development, ARPANET became the prototype for the emergence of the Internet - a network connecting the computers of ordinary users around the world, reminds Gizmodo .

Professor Clayrock and IMP, prototype of the modern modem

Vladimir Putin’s expression “The Internet arose as a CIA project and developed” is partly true: as you know, the defense agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was involved in the creation of the first computer network for US government needs since the late 1950s. In the context of the developing Cold War with the USSR, America needed a stable data transmission system in case of hostilities.

By 1969, DARPA had prepared the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) project, a network connecting several computers at four scientific institutions: the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Center, the University of Utah and the University of California at Santa Barbara. The first server was installed on September 2 at the University of California and had 24 kilobytes of RAM.

The first data transfer session occurred on October 29 at 22:30 local time between computers at the University of California (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Center (SRI), located 640 kilometers away from each other. An ordinary case for today's Internet, where computers around the world exchange billions of bytes every day.

According to the UCLA website, the first data transfer was not 100 percent successful. Student Charlie Kline, under the guidance of Professor Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA, had to convey the message to programmer Bill Duvall of SRI. The goal was to “log in” to the remote computer, so the testers decided to simply transmit the word “login” character by character.

During the data transfer process, they confirmed each character sent by telephone. However, after the first two letters - "L" and "O" - were sent, the system broke down (some sources claim that the first three letters were transmitted). It was possible to finish sending the message only an hour later.

The fact of the successful transmission of the first message was recorded in a memo from the experiment participants from UCLA.

In addition to the day of the first data transmission over the network, there are other holidays that are somehow related to the Internet. International Internet Day is celebrated around the world on April 4th. This date was chosen in honor of the medieval Archbishop of Seville: it is believed that his 20-volume encyclopedia became the prototype of the knowledge repository that is the Internet. In addition, the 4.04 date format resembles the 404 error code common on the Internet, meaning that the requested page was not found.

In Russia, the date September 30 has taken root as Internet Day. On this day in 1998, at the initiative of the IT Infoart Stars company, the first census of Runet users was carried out, from which it turned out that about a million people use the Network. According to another version, the Birthday of the Runet is celebrated on April 7: in 1994, on this day the first domain in the .ru domain zone was registered.

Happy birthday,
Nikita Likhachev,
TJournal

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