50th anniversary of the Internet celebration
On October 29, 1960, the first connection between computers was carried out and settled the pace to what is known today in the world
The Internet celebrates 50 years of the first connection between computers for data transfer on Tuesday, which gave rise to what we know today. Its predecessor was the ARPANET network (‘Advanced Research Projects Agency Network’).
This network was created in 1969 on behalf of the Department of Defense of the United States that wanted means of communication between the different agencies and institutions of the country and that compiled the ideas and research of teams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National Physics Laboratory of the United Kingdom and the Rand Corporation, the US research laboratory for the country’s Armed Forces.
The network was born from ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency that was founded in 1958 in the United States through the Department of Defense as explained on its official website with three research focuses: space technology, ballistic missile defense and solid thrusters. It is currently called DARPA (Defense Advanced Researchs Projects Agency).
In 1962, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, an MIT researcher who created the computational research program within ARPA, where he was the boss, joined to the project. He defended the concept of the Galactic Network that ensured a network could be established to interconnected computers globally where anyone could access data and programs from anywhere, as they said in an MIT report.
Thus, on October 29, 1969, the first message was sent between two computers in the United States through this network from the University of California (UCLA), where the first node of the connection had been established. It consisted on the use of two Interface Message Processors (IMP) that were established at the points they wanted to connect. That is, at UCLA and at the Stanford Research Institute in California.
On UCLA’s own website, they say that Professor Kleinrock was supervising his student Charley Kline, a programmer, and that they established a transmission of a message to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 central computer to another SDS 940 central computer where there was another programmer, Bill Duvall.
The transmission, as narrated on the page, consisted of issuing the ‘login’ word from UCLA to SRI, but they could only transmit the ‘l’ and the ‘o’, because the system broke down after this. So they could not convey the entire message until an hour later.
K. Tovar
Source: dpa
