It's not often that I get to celebrate a technology that is, fundamentally, the heart and soul of the day job over at PRI's The World. We're talking existential here, folks. The Internet turned 40 last week. That's UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock, with the Interface Message Processor. Forty years ago, Kleinrock and his team sent the first message between two computers. One of the computers was at UCLA, and the other was up at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). That message was supposed to be "L-O-G-I-N." Prophetically, maybe poetically, only the "L" and "O" got through before the Net experienced its first system crash. Anyone know how to say "Fail Whale" in 1969-speak? Anyway -- to celebrate, UCLA threw a symposium-ish bash. You can read more about that here. Our intrepid left coast correspondent, Cyrus Farivar, happened to be down in Los Angeles for the festivities. He sent us interviews with Kleinrock and Charles Kline (who typed that fateful "L-O" message). We start, however, with an audio homage to "Internet," complete with an appropriate soundtrack from Marvin Gaye:
I know many of you will be asking for some of the source material for the opening audio montage. So, below, please find two incredibly enlightening videos. This stuff is gold, people, pure gold.
Tags: Computer Software, Computers, Internet
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