Complex Numbers

Lo!

Well, that's finally over. Now I just get to grump at holiday season chatter.

Today's article, from BBC, has nothing to do with politics or seasons, and everything to do with the invention you're using right now.

    'We were just trying to get it to work': The failure that started the internet  

There have been differences of opinion concerning the actual beginning of the internet. It's not like a human birth, or Armstrong's boot on the moon: a clear and obvious transition point. In my view, this article is more about a precursor technology, but a vital one for what the internet became.

On 29 October 1969, two scientists established a connection between computers some 350 miles away and started typing a message. Halfway through, it crashed.

1969 would have been long before "try rebooting and reinstalling all your drivers" would become tech support's second suggestion, after "make sure it's plugged in."

At the height of the Cold War, Charley Kline and Bill Duvall were two bright-eyed engineers on the front lines of one of technology's most ambitious experiments.

I should note, for context, that this was the same year as the aforementioned moon landing. Unlike NASA's stated mission, though, this early attempt at remote networking was in service of more military pursuits.

Funded by the US Department of Defense, the project aimed to create a network that could directly share data without relying on telephone lines. Instead, this system used a method of data delivery called "packet switching" that would later form the basis for the modern internet.

Like I said, not the actual invention of the internet, and military.

It was the first test of a technology that would change almost every facet of human life. But before it could work, you had to log in.

Some things don't change.

But Kline didn't even make it all the way through the word "L-O-G-I-N" before Duvall told him over the phone that his system crashed. Thanks to that error, the first "message" that Kline sent Duvall on that autumn day in 1969 was simply the letters "L-O".

And that's what I find amusing about the story: it's very Biblical. "Lo!" As in "Lo and behold."

On the other talon, I want to think that once they got it working (which, as the article notes, they did, after about an hour), the second message sent over this proto-internet was "Send nudes."

The BBC spoke to Kline and Duvall for the 55th anniversary of the occasion.

The rest is a transcript of that interview. It goes into more depth over what happened (or didn't happen) at the time, but there's no reason to repeat it here.

As compelling as this origin story is, I had this vague memory of a different origin story for the internet, one which took place some years later. In a rare case of me actually looking something up, I found this entry from 2019: "Birthed in Beer" 

So if I had to choose which one was the actual invention of the internet, I'd pick the 1970s one, because it involved beer.