The Information Age had a somewhat inauspicious beginning. Just three months after man first walked on the Moon, a UCLA professor and a grad student successfully sent a message over ARPANET, one of the world’s first computer networks and the predecessor to the modern Internet, in October 1969. Using a set of primitive routers that connected Leonard Kleinrock and Charley Kline at UCLA with Bill Duvall at Stanford, on phone lines leased from AT&T, the first message was sent. Attempting to transmit the word “login,” a system crash limited the message to just “lo.” An hour later, the entire message was transmitted successfully.
Lo, are you there?
In 2015, Kleinrock admitted the accidental transmission (“lo”) turned out to be a powerful and prophetic message. Essentially, the meaning of the message sent 350 miles (563 km) up the California coast was “hello.”
Kline, who was only 21 years old at the time, later said he didn’t think he was making history. “I had no expectation that what I was doing that evening would be particularly significant,” he said.
The first-ever official email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer and programmer for BBN Technologies. By this time, ARPANET connected 15 computers.