Tour the Birthplace of the Internet (Obscura Day 2011)
Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 11:03AM ;)
Do you live in Los Angeles? Join me April 9th at UCLA for Obscura Day! I'll be hosting an event with Brad Fidler and Leonard Kleinrock in the room where the first Internet message was sent in 1969! Reserve your tickets today!
Come be one of the very first to rediscover the room where the Internet was born. Almost forgotten in history and used for years as an unremarkable classroom at UCLA, it will reopen as a museum this July. Get there first and stand in the very spot that the first modem sent the first message ever, and see photos and documents from those first days of the Internet that have been lost to obscurity for decades.
Brad Fidler, director of the upcoming Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site and Archive (known colloquially by its room number, 3420 Boelter Hall), will introduce the history of this revolutionary site and the stories of the people who gave this room its significance. What was the first illegal use of the Internet? Why did everything always crash? Why did the graduate students give everything dirty acronyms, and draw horns on a machine called the Interface Message Processor, or, the (perhaps evil) IMP?
Leonard Kleinrock, the man who is credited with doing the math and running the simulations that made the early Internet possible – and still runs it today – will be on hand to answer questions and tell everyone the story about exactly what it was like to send the first message ever.
You’ll also be encouraged to think why some people think this site is irrelevant, and why others believe it might soon be the most famous place in Los Angeles.
Reader Comments (5)
Invention of the modem and intervention of the Internet are two very different things. What was then running were connections between two cumputers, where one was in receiving mode, one was in sending mode for a whole session. Internet requires a lot more than be able to sens/recieve a simple message.
@Herman Those distinctions are precisely the kind of thing we'll be talking about on Saturday. In the meantime you can read about why the IEEE has recognized that site as the birthplace of the internet: http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestones:Birthplace_of_the_Internet,_1969
I quote exactly from the site you indicated: "The deployment of the ARPANET set in motion a train of developments that led to the Internet as we know it today"
That is a far cry from the title "Birthplace of the Internet". I find it annoying that an organization like IEEE is so sloppy in its wording, and takes away the credit the proper inventors of the Internet deserve.
I think that picture shows an old server. If I am wrong, then tell you what it is, because I saw something similar to an exhibition of old electronics.If this is true, it means that my visual memory is not cheating on me.
@David That photo is of the first IMP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor