🎉🎉 Happy Birthday Internet 🎉🎉.

IT BEGAN – some would say, as it meant to go on – with an error message. Late on the evening of 29 October 1969, student programmer Charles Kline attempted to send some text from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to another at the Stanford Research Institute, more than 500 kilometres up the Californian coast.

“LOGIN”, it was supposed to say. Kline got as far as “LO” before the system crashed. The full message was resent an hour later. What would eventually morph into the largest communications network in human history had made its debut: the internet.

It is fair to say that no one there quite appreciated the full scope of what had happened. “We knew we were creating an important new technology that we expected would be of use to a segment of the population, but we had no idea how truly momentous an event it was,” Leonard Kleinrock, Kline’s supervisor, later said. Fifty years on, we are still only just beginning to come to terms with the consequences.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, as the internet’s precursor is better known, was an academic project intended to allow computers to share information. Funded by the US Department of Defense, the UCLA and Stanford computers were the first two nodes of this network. By December 1969, two others had been installed: at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.