The internet’s birthday, aka the day when pressing the letter G crashed the whole internet
Today is the internet’s and, in a sign of things to come, its first few steps saw things crashing for no obvious reason:
At 21:00, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first nodes of what was then known as Arpanet…
The fledgling network was to be tested by Charley Kline attempting to remotely log in to a Scientific Data Systems computer that resided at SRI.
Kline typed an “L” and then asked his colleague Bill Duvall at SRI via a telephone headset if the letter had arrived.
It had.
Kline typed an “O”. Duvall said that arrived too.
Kline typed a “G”. Duvall could only report that the system had crashed.
Thanks to the wonders of forty years of technical progress pressing one key now never makes a system crash. Oh, hang on…
* I say birthday but, rather like the Queen writ large, the internet has more than one birthday.
Using that date as the internet’s birth date means I can justifiably claim to be “younger than the internet” 🙂
I think there’s a better case for 1 January 1983, when the Internet truly became an internetwork with the ARPANET switchover from NCP to TCP/IP. That was also the last time the whole Internet went down at once. If you ask the right people, some of them still have the flags that were handed out.
It’s a real shame that we won’t get a second flag day when we all switch to IPv6.