The First Internet Message Crashed in 1969

He types one letter. L. Three hundred and fifty miles north, a voice in his ear says... got it. He types the second. O. Got it. He reaches for the third... and everything dies. That crash, right there, is the reason the first word ever sent across the internet is only two letters long. And the reason it turned out to be the perfect word. October twenty-ninth, nineteen sixty-nine. A windowless room on the third floor of Boelter Hall at U.C.L.A. A graduate student named Charley Kline, telephone headset clamped over one ear. The voice in that headset is Bill Duvall, a systems engineer at the Stanford Research Institute up in Menlo Park. And yes, they're on a regular phone call, reading letters out loud to each other, because in nineteen sixty-nine the only way to check whether your network worked was to ring up a human being and ask. The word they were trying to send was login. L-O-G-I-N. Log in to Duvall's machine from four hundred miles away, as if the two computers were one machine. They got two letters out. Lo. Rewind about seven weeks. Around Labor Day, a truck pulls up at U.C.L.A. and unloads a steel box from a Boston company called Bolt Beranek and Newman. A ruggedized Honeywell five sixteen, roughly the size of a refrigerator. They called it an Interface Message Processor. It is, essentially, the world's first router. Three more would follow, one a month. Menlo Park. Santa Barbara. Utah. And when a Massachusetts senator named Edward Kennedy heard his home state had won the million dollar contract, he fired off a telegram congratulating them on building the... Interfaith Message Processor. So what was that refrigerator actually doing? Picture the old way. Two computers talking needed one dedicated phone line, held hostage the whole time. Leonard Kleinrock's idea, worked out in the mathematics of his doctoral dissertation back in nineteen sixty-three, was to stop sending a phone call and start sending postcards. Chop your message into chunks. Address every chunk. Let each one find its own route, and reassemble them at the far end. One road jammed? The postcard takes another. That's packet switching. And that is still, right now, how this audio is reaching your ears. Back to the room. L. O. Kline types G... and nothing arrives. The network is gone. Here's why, and honestly it's beautiful. The machine at S.R.I. was built to receive text at about ten characters a second. Human typing speed. The ARPANET was firing at it at five thousand characters a second. The buffer, the little bucket holding incoming characters, overflowed and took the whole program down with it. Duvall's description, decades later, to the B.B.C.? It was like filling a glass with a fire hose. Duvall knew instantly what had happened. He made the bucket bigger. About an hour later they tried again, and this time the whole word went through. And Charley Kline wrote it up the way you'd log a spare part order. Twenty-nine October sixty-nine. Twenty-two thirty. Talked to S.R.I. host to host. Three initials in the margin. C.S.K. One line of handwriting in a paper logbook. The Smithsonian now holds an artwork built around that single sentence. Because nobody had prepared anything. No engraved plaque. Nothing quotable. Kleinrock has been blunt about it: we had no idea, he said, we had nothing ready, because all we wanted to do was to log in. And then the part I love. Years later, looking back at that broken, half transmitted, accidental two letter fragment, he said they couldn't have asked for a more succinct, more prophetic, more powerful message than... lo. As in, lo and behold. Four computers. Los Angeles, Menlo Park, Santa Barbara, Utah. And a bunch of graduate students so unsure of their own authority that when they sat down to write the rules for how machines should talk to each other, they titled the documents Request for Comments. Steve Crocker wrote number one, April nineteen sixty-nine. Bill Duvall wrote number two. Every standard your phone is using tonight still arrives that way. Politely. As a request. So the next time something you're holding freezes, buffers, or just quietly gives up on you... go easy on it. It's carrying on a family tradition. The internet's very first word was a system crash.