Internet is a teenager even at 40
San Francisco: The internet, the greatest aid to productivity in history, turns 40 this week. On October 29, 2009, two letters - LO - were typed on a keyboard in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and appeared on a screen at the Stanford Research Institute, 314 miles away.
Leonard Kleinrock had planned to type LOGIN, but the connection was lost just before the G. Nonetheless, this was the first time a message had been sent over a telephone line between two computers. Kleinrock's team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on the ARPANE, for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Computers at two other U.S. universities were added to the network by the end of that year.
"We had four-node network and tested the heck out of it. We were able to break the network at will. It was very valuable to shake those things out early on," said Kleinrock.
That time, It was not called the internet; that name was not coined for another five years. It was called Arpanet, for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, and was developed by scientists in the U.S. Defense Department. Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones. "I thought it would be computer to computer, not people to people," said Kleinrock in a nod to online social networking and content sharing that are hallmarks of the Internet Age.
Kleinrock had outlined his vision in a 1962 graduate school dissertation published as a book. "Nobody cared, in particular AT&T. I went to them and they said that it wouldn't work and even if it worked they didn't want anything to do with it." Finally, funding came from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established in 1958 in response to the launch of a Sputnik space flight by what was then the Soviet Union. U.S. leaders were in a technology race with cold war rival Russia.
Kleinrock's team ran a 15-foot cable between an interface message processor device referred to by the acronym IMP and a "host" computer and tested sending data back and forth on September 2, 1969. "That was the day this baby was born," said Kleinrock.
Leonard Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube that day 40 years ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the internet. At the time of celebrating 40th birthday party of Internet at UCLA on Thursday, Kleinrock said, "We are constantly surprised by the applications that come along. It's a teenager now. It has learned some things but it has a long way to go. It's behaving erratically, but it has given enormous gratification to its parents and the community."
Kleinrock pegs the launch of "the dark side of the Internet" to the 1988 release of the first malicious software 'worm'. It was April of 1994 when the first spam email hit. "We started sending email back to those folks saying 'Stop it'. We sent so much email we crashed their computer. Inadvertently, the first spam email created the first denial-of-service response," said Kleinrock.
