Late on the evening of October 29, 1969, a graduate student named Charley Kline sat in front of a computer at UCLA in Los Angeles. About 350 miles north, at Stanford Research Institute near San Francisco, another researcher named Bill Duvall was waiting at his own computer. Kline picked up the phone to confirm they were ready. Then he started typing the word 'LOGIN' on his keyboard, which was supposed to travel through a brand-new network called ARPANET - the very first long-distance computer-to-computer link.
He typed L. 'You got the L?' he asked Duvall over the phone. Yes. He typed O. 'Got the O?' Yes. He typed G. The system crashed. The first message ever sent over the ancestor of the internet was just two letters: 'LO.' It was accidentally poetic - like the start of a greeting. About an hour later, the team got the bug fixed and Kline typed the full word LOGIN successfully. ARPANET was alive.
ARPANET had been funded by the U.S. Defense Department to let big research computers share information. By the end of 1969 it linked four computers in California and Utah. By the 1980s it had grown to hundreds of sites worldwide. In 1983 it switched to a new set of rules called TCP/IP that all kinds of networks could speak - turning ARPANET into the global internet. Today there are roughly five billion people online and trillions of messages flying around every day. All of it traces back to a crashed computer and the world's shortest, most famous hello: LO.
