Troublemakers

Troublemakers Prometheus in the Pentagon
BOB TAYLOR

It started with a crash. On October 29, 1969, a $700,000 Sigma 7 computer at UCLA sent a command to a slightly leaner SDS 940 machine at the Stanford Research Institute.

The UCLA machine looked formidable. A half-dozen or more refrigerator-sized components lined the perimeter of a special room dedicated to their use, the entire operation controlled by an expert sitting at a typewriter-looking console in the center of the room.

But when the UCLA machine sent its command-LOGIN-up the California coast, the Stanford computer crashed before the word, typed letter by letter, even got past G.

After a bit of reprogramming, the message was sent again and received, and the first computer network, called the Arpanet, was online.1

This transmission, often hailed as the "birthday of the Internet," has been celebrated in conferences, books, speeches, and news reports. Plaques have been erected in its honor. One man who worked on the network at UCLA has since recast the failed initial login in biblical terms: "And so the very first message ever sent over the Internet was 'Lo!' as in 'Lo and behold!' Quite a prophetic message indeed."2

Of course, no such message was intended. That LOGIN was the computing equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell's "Mr. Watson, come here": a practical effort to determine if a message had been received. Whatever importance the LOGIN transmission has achieved by now, back in 1969, the sent message was not a momentous achievement. At UCLA and Stanford, there was a bit of applause and a lot of relief but no announcements from press offices, no reporters waiting to hear if the connection would work. A simple notation in a UCLA log book, "2230, Talked to SRI host to host," served as recognition. At the universities-and at the Pentagon, where the Department of Defense had funded this new network; and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a small company called Bolt Beranek and Newman was

Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and served on the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She received her PhD in History from Stanford and her BA in American Studies from Yale. She has two college-age children and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, whom she has known since they were both twelve years old. She is the author of Troublemakers.