50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420
Here’s the story of the creation of ARPANET, the groundbreaking precursor to the internet—as told by the people who were there.
When I visited UCLA’s Boelter Hall last Wednesday, I took the stairs to the third floor, looking for Room 3420. And then I walked right by it. From the hallway, it’s a pretty unassuming place.
But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California. It was the beginning of ARPANET, the small network of academic computers that was the precursor to the internet.
Continue reading… “50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420”
