Before Ebay, before Google, before Al Gore, before Tim Berners-Lee
– there was a small acoustical consulting firm in Cambridge,
MA that put together the team: that designed the system,
that fabricated the hardware, that wrote the code, that built the
house of Internet.
On October 3, 1969, for the fi rst time, two computers at remote
locations ‘spoke’ to each other over the roadbed of the Internet.
Connected by 350 miles of leased telephone line, the two machines,
one at the University of California in Los Angeles and the other at
Stanford Research Institute, attempted the simplest of messages:
the word ‘login’ transmitted one letter at a time. ‘L’ and ‘O’ transmitted
perfectly. When the ‘G’ was transmitted, the SRI computer
crashed. Despite the crash, a major hurdle had been cleared and the
computers had actually managed to convey a meaningful message,
even if not the one planned; in its own phonetic fashion, the UCLA
computer said ‘ello’ to its compatriot in Stanford. The first, albeit tiny, computer, innovative network was now in operation.