Friday, October 30th, 2009

Arpanet Anniversary

Leonard Kleinrock and the first Interface Message Processor, 1969. Photo courtesy Leonard Kleinrock.

Forty years ago this week, the first information was transmitted across the ARPANET, a test message routed from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute. Though the message sent on the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 29, 1969 was incomplete -- the system crashed after the 'L'and 'O' of 'LOGIN' were transmitted to SRI -- that packet-switched transmission became the basis of much of our modern era of communications. In this segment, Ira talks with internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock about that first transmission and what networked computing has become.