In October 1969 a graduate student named Charley Kline sat at a computer at UCLA and tried to log in to another computer 350 miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. The two machines were linked by ARPANET - a brand-new network funded by the U.S. military to let scientists share research.
Kline started typing “LOGIN.” The L showed up at Stanford. So did the O. Then the system crashed. So the very first message ever sent on the internet was the word “LO” - like a tiny “hello.” About an hour later they got it working again, and computers around the world have been chatting ever since.
ARPANET grew slowly at first. Universities and labs plugged in, then companies, then ordinary phone customers. For its first decade, the entire internet had fewer than a thousand computers. Today it links more than 30 billion devices, from supercomputers to smart fridges to the watch on someone’s wrist.
