There have been sixty-four years since two men sent the first packet-switched data across a telephone line, and this was the birth of the Internet. To exchange information with each other, Charley Kline and Bill Duvall came up with the idea of using data packets.
The mechanism works in the following way: A user inputs a character, which is transmitted, for example, through the use of a modem to modulate a tone of audio, to the remote destination.
Upon receiving the character at the destination, it is repeated or sent back to its origin to guarantee that the character has been received.,
It was in the 1950s that the internet originated, and this can be traced back to the USA of those days. In the late Cold War, as tensions between North America and the Soviet Union reached their peak, a war of attrition emerged between them, which eventually led to the end of the Cold War.
A deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons was at the disposal of both superpowers, and people lived in fear of long-range surprise attacks by either of these powers.
As a result, the US realized that it needed a communication system that would be immune from a Soviet nuclear attack that could affect its operations.
When these computers were first invented, military scientists and university employees were the only ones who could afford these large, expensive devices.
According to the report, this project was partially sponsored by the US Department of Defense, and the aim was to develop a network for sharing data directly without using telephone lines. There were several different ways to deliver data using this system, such as using packet switching, the same technology that would later form the basis of the modern internet that we know today.
This test was one of the earliest to test a technology that would improve almost every aspect of our daily lives. It would not be possible for it to work without logging in first.
A hazel-green wall encloses the Boelter Hall Room 3420, where Kline sat at his keyboard in preparation for the connection with Duvall, who was working on a computer halfway across the state of California from where he sat.
Kline was still not even halfway through the word "L-O-G-I-N" when Duvall randomly called him over the phone and informed him that his computer had crashed due to an error code. It was due to this error of Kline's that Duvall only received the letter "L-O" from Kline on that autumn day in 1969, even though it was her first "message."
The Arpanet system began transferring messages between computers on October 29, 1969 when the first "node-to-node" message was sent between two computers. A research lab at UCLA had the first computer, and a research lab at Stanford had the second, each one was larger than a large room. Although the message was short and simple—“LOGIN”—it crashed Arpanet anyway; only the first two letters of the note reached the Stanford computer, leading to the crash.
Arpanet, as it came to be known back then, was only a network of four computers by the end of 1969, but it continued to grow steadily throughout the 1970s.
The University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet was added to the network in 1972, and a year later, the Norwegian Seismic Array network was added to the network as well as the network of the London's University College. There was a period of time when packet-switched computer networks were very popular, but after that time, it became increasingly difficult to integrate these networks into a single global "internet."
Vinton Cerf, a computing scientist of the 1960s, was able to develop a way to communicate among computers that were on all the world's mini-networks by the mid-1970s when he was able to create a way for all those computers to communicate with one another over the mini-networks of the internet. His invention was called the "Transmission Control Protocol" or TCP, and he named it after that.
In the words of one writer, Cerf's protocol is the "handshake" that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space and introduces them to one another for the first time.
It was the evening of October 29, 1969, when two young programmers sat at computer terminals 350 miles apart in two different parts of the world: Charley Kline, a student at UCLA, and Bill Duvall, a student at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), located in Northern California. He was attempting to log in to Duvall's computer using a username and password that Kline knew. “The first thing I typed was an L,” Kline saysHaving obtained the information over the phone, Duvall informed Kline that he had received it. “I typed the O, and he got the O.” Then Kline typed the G. Then Kline typed the D. “And then he had a bug, and the machine crashed.” And that was that. As soon as both hosts connected to the new network, the first message they sent each other was a simple "lo." The problem was quickly resolved, and the connection was fully operational before they went home.
"It was just engineers working," Kleinrock says, adding that the team knew they'd succeeded, but didn't dwell on the significance of their accomplishment. "People were busy," he says.
It was Duvall's viewpoint that the connection that was made on October 29 represented just one phase in the larger task of connecting computers together. As a result of Kleinrock's research, which focused on how data packets were directed around a network, what the SRI researchers were focusing on, was the actual construction of the packets, as well as the organization of the data within them.
The paradigm that we see today on the internet with links, indexed documents, and many other things of that nature developed within this context," Duvall says, "as a result of the development of this paradigm."
A few weeks after Kline and Duvall's initial success in establishing communication on the ARPA network, the network expanded to connect computers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
Through the 1970s and much of the 1980s, ARPANET continued to grow, integrating more computers from government institutions and academic research facilities. This foundational network laid the groundwork for what would later evolve into the modern Internet, incorporating many of the core concepts developed within the ARPANET framework.
In 1969, a UCLA press release highlighted the remarkable achievement of ARPANET, quoting Leonard Kleinrock, a key figure in its development, who observed, “As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy.” While the description of networks as "infant" might now seem dated, considering how extensively data networks have permeated homes, businesses, and even the smallest internet-connected devices, Kleinrock’s vision was remarkably forward-thinking. His idea of "computer utilities" foreshadowed an era where computing power would eventually become a widely accessible resource, much like electricity.
Although the modern, commercial Internet wouldn’t materialize until several decades later, Kleinrock’s insight remains strikingly relevant. In 2019, computing resources have indeed approached the ubiquity he envisioned, becoming a seamless part of everyday life.
Milestone anniversaries such as this one not only invite reflection on the history and rapid development of networked communication but also provide an opportunity to look forward. Just as Kleinrock envisioned possibilities beyond his time, today’s innovators might consider the potential directions and advancements that await in the future of networking and connectivity.
