The Birth of
The Internet

Nineteen sixty-nine was quite a year. Man on the moon. Woodstock. Mets won the World Series. Charles Manson starts killing these people here in Los Angeles. And the Internet was born. Well, the first four everybody knew about. Nobody knew about the Internet.

So the switch arrives. Nobody notices. However, a month later, Stanford Research Institute gets their I.M.P. [Interface Message Processor], and they connect their host to their switch. Think of a square box, our computer, connected to a circle, which is the I.M.P., 5, 10 feet away. There's another I.M.P. 400 miles north of us in Menlo Park, basically at Stanford Research Institute. And there's a high-speed line connecting those two. We are now prepared to connect two hosts together over this fledgling network.

So on October 29, 1969, at 10:30 in the evening, you will find in a log, a notebook log that I have in my office at U.C.L.A., an entry which says, "Talked to SRI host to host."

If you want to be, shall I say, poetic about it, the September event was when the infant Internet took its first breath.

--- Leonard Kleinrock,
Professor of computer science at U.C.L.A.
From "An Oral History of the Internet"
Vanity Fair
September 2009