Internet a quirky teenager as it turns 40

Leonard Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube that day 40 years ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the internet.

"We are constantly surprised by the applications that come along," said Kleinrock as he and others at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), prepared to throw the internet a 40th birthday party. "It's a teenager now. It's learned some things, but it has a long way to go. It's behaving erratically, but it's given enormous gratification to its parents and the community."

On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to "talk" to one at a research institute. Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.

"I thought it would be computer-to-computer, not people-to-people," Kleinrock said in a nod to online social networking and content sharing that are hallmarks of the Internet Age.

A key to getting computers to exchange data was breaking digitised information into packets fired between on-demand with no wasting of time, according to Kleinrock. He had outlined his vision in a 1962 graduate school dissertation.

"Nobody cared, in particular AT&T," said Kleinrock. "I went to them and they said it wouldn't work and that even if it worked they didn't want anything to do with it."

US telecommunication colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for Arpanet, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military.

Engineers began typing 'LOG' to log into the distant computer, which crashed after getting the 'O'.

"So, the first message was 'Lo' as in 'Lo and behold'," Kleinrock recounted. "We couldn't have a better, more succinct first message."

Kleinrock's team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on Arpanet. Computers at two other US universities were added to the network by year end.

"We had a four-node network and tested the heck out of it," said Kleinrock. "We were able to break the network at will. It was very valuable to shake those things out early on."

Funding came from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) established in 1958 in response to the launch of a Sputnik space flight by what was then the Soviet Union.

Kleinrock's team ran a 15-foot cable between an Interface Message Processor device referred to by the acronym IMP and a "host" computer and tested sending data back and forth on September 2, 1969.

"That was the day this baby was born," he said.

The National Science Foundation added a series of super computers to the network in the late 1980s, opening the online community to more scientists. "The internet was there, but it was not known to Joe Blow on the street," said Kleinrock.

The internet caught the public's attention in the form of e-mail systems in workplaces and ignited a 'dot-com' industry boom that went bust at the turn of the century.

"The original plan was that it should be very creative, basically it should be like a sandbox," British professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said of creating the World Wide Web in 1990.

Kleinrock pegs the launch of "the dark side of the internet" to the 1988 release of the first malicious software 'worm'.

It was April 1994 when the first spam e-mail hit. "We started sending e-mail back to them saying 'Stop it'," said Kleinrock. "We sent so much e-mail we crashed their computer. Inadvertently, the first spam e-mail created the first denial-of-service response."

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