The First Message

October 29, 1969 – It was 10:30PM in Room 3420 of UCLA’s Boelter Hall when a team led by Professor Kleinrock attempted to send the first host-to-host message over ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet.

A programmer named Charley Kline tried to send the word “LOGIN” to another computer at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, but the system crashed after only two letters.

Thus, the first message sent through cyberspace was simply “LO.”

There were no photos taken or any fanfare to commemorate the landmark achievement, but this was a huge leap forward in communication. In today’s world, approximately 300,000 to 275,000 text messages and over 200 million emails are sent every second.