From Popular Mechanics:
The 50 Most Important Websites of All Time
Charles Kline’s first attempt to send a message over ARPANET, the early computer network that would birth the internet as we know it, was a bit of a bust.
Sitting at his massive mainframe computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, the grad student sent an “L” to another apartment-sized machine at Stanford University. Then an “O.” But before Kline could get to the “G” in his attempt to send the word “LOGIN,” the system crashed. He would revive the connection later that night and successfully transmit all five letters, but it wouldn’t matter if he hadn’t. He had already made history.
On October 29, 1969, “LO” was the first message successfully sent over a computer-to-computer network.
It would be another decade before ARPANET gave way to the internet, and another decade after that before the World Wide Web was born. Before those revolutions could be realized, two major questions had to be answered: How could ARPANET expand, and what the hell were people supposed to do with it, anyway?
The first problem was addressed by internet icons like Vinton Cerf, who developed the protocols that would allow different networks to connect to one another and form a larger network of networks. (In other words, an “internet.”)
Much more at the site - a fascinating story well told. Here is the recreation of the original web page at CERN. We have come a long long way.
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