29 October 21

This is the 52nd anniversary of the first successful transmission of a text message through a computer network. That message was the letters "l" and "o." As told in Wikipedia, “The first successful message on the ARPANET [a precursor to the Internet] was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969), from Boelter Hall 3420. Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 Host computer. The message text was the word 'login'; on an earlier attempt the l and the o letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was 'lo.' About an hour later, after the programmers repaired the code that caused the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full login.” The computer terminals used in 1969 had no mice or color monitors; those developments would take another 25 years.