The LA Times had a great piece about the formation of the Internet (the one Al Gore built, that is, the DARPA funded initiative). Tomorrow, October 29th, 2009 the Internet turns 40 (my how it’s matured in the last few years). The article is a quick and easy read about how a few (much younger then) professors and researchers at Stanford and UCLA first sent packets of info from LA to Palo Alto through an “Interface Message Processor”. One of the protagonists was Leonard Kleinrock (who taught CS at UCLA and still does).
Their goal was to login remotely from one computer to the other. Even in failure was their first success:
What happened in that big moment? All we wanted to do was log in to the second host computer at SRI, 400 miles to the north, to see if one machine could talk to another. You have to type “L-O-G” and then the remote machine types “I-N.” We typed the L and [called SRI and] said, did you get the L? Yep, got the L. Get the O? Yep, got the O. Typed the G and craaaaash. But the message couldn’t have been shorter or more prophetic: LO, lo and behold. You can’t beat that. (LA Times, “Net worker”)
He also recounts the first time he and his crew ever came across spam. Their response to the culprit? “You can’t do that. Bad. Stop. Horrible”. Then they sent so much email back to the spammer that it marked the first denial of service and crashed their networks.
So much changes just to stay the same.
Here’s to you, Internet. May you grow and grow but never become self-aware.