On August 30, 1969, the very first piece of internet hardware landed at UCLA. Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) shipped the first Interface Message Processor — a modified Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer with a mere 12K of memory — to Leonard Kleinrock’s Network Measurements Center. It arrived two days ahead of schedule, and a small team of graduate students, including Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Jon Postel, got to work installing it. That box became the first node of the ARPANET, the Pentagon-funded research network that would eventually grow into the internet we use today.
The IMP’s job was deceptively simple but hugely consequential: it acted as a dedicated gateway, taking data from a host computer and breaking it into packets to send across the network, laying the groundwork for the packet-switching approach that still underpins how data moves online. A second IMP reached Stanford Research Institute about a month later, and on October 29, 1969, the two machines exchanged the first message ever sent between networked computers — an attempted “LOGIN” that crashed after the first two letters, “LO,” were transmitted. Modest beginnings for what became a global network connecting billions of devices.
Also notable on this day: August 30, 1907 is the birthday of John Mauchly, the physicist who, with J. Presper Eckert, built ENIAC — the first large-scale electronic computer — a couple of decades before that first IMP ever booted up.
Source: This Day in Tech History
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
