In 1969, a message was sent over the ARPANET, the predecessor of the modern internet, but a system crash limited it to just “lo”. The first official email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, connecting 15 computers.
The information age got off to a somewhat inauspicious start. Just three months after man first walked on the moon, a UCLA professor and a college student successfully sent a message over the ARPANET, one of the world’s first computer networks and the predecessor of the modern Internet, in October 1969. Using a series of primitive routers connecting Leonard Kleinrock and Charley Kline at UCLA with Bill Duvall at Stanford, over leased phone lines from AT&T, the first message was sent. Attempting to broadcast the word “login”, a system crash limited the message to just “lo”. An hour later, the entire message was successfully transmitted.
Here, are you there?
In 2015, Kleinrock admitted that accidental transmission (“it”) turned out to be a powerful and prophetic message. Essentially, the meaning of the message sent 350 miles (563 km) up the California coast was “hello.”
Kline, who was just 21 at the time, later said he didn’t plan on making history. “I didn’t expect what I was doing that night to be particularly meaningful,” he said.
The first ever official email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer and programmer for BBN Technologies. At this point, ARPANET has connected 15 computers.
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