the first internet message

In today's excerpt - the first internet message, sent in
1969, was "lo." The meaning and efficacy of
messages sent via the internet has been declining
ever since:


"On October 29, 1969, the message 'lo' became the
first ever to travel between two computers connected
via the ARPANET, the computer network that would
become the Internet.The truncated transmission
traveled about 400 miles (643 kilometers) between
the University of California, Los Angeles, and the
Stanford Research Institute.The electronic dispatch
was supposed to be the word "login," but only the first
two letters were successfully sent before the system
crashed. ...


"Created by the U.S. Department of Defense's
Advanced Research Projects Agency, the original
ARPANET was a network of just four computer
terminals installed at universities and research
institutions in California and Utah. With its truncated
missive 40 years ago today, ARPANET became the
world's first operational packet-switching network.



" 'Packet-switching was the original transmission
mechanism [for our network] in 1969 and is still the
underlying technology of the Internet today,' said
Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA computer engineer who
was involved in ARPANET's creation. In a packet-
switched connection, a message from one computer
is broken down into chunks, or packets, of data and
sent through multiple routes to another computer.
Once all the packets arrive at their destination, they
are pasted back together into the original message.



" 'It's as if a long letter were written on a series of
small postcards, and each postcard was mailed
separately,' Kleinrock said. Packet-switching replaced
a less efficient and less flexible transmission
technology used by early telephone companies called
circuit-switching, which relied on dedicated
connections between two parties. 'When you and I talk
over a circuit-switched connection, that connection is
totally dedicated to our conversation,' Kleinrock
explained. 'Even if we pause to take a coffee break,
the connection is still ours and sits by idly while we
are silent.'


"By contrast, data packets in a packet-switched
transmission have multiple routes open to them and
will hop on to the one with the least amount of traffic.
In this way, no route is idle for long. In the years
following ARPANET's deployment, other packet-
switching networks were created, but they were
internal networks that had only limited access to one
other. It wasn't until the mid-1970s that engineers
developed a way to merge networks to create the
Internet. In 1984 the domain system that
includes .com, .gov, and .edu was established. A
decade after that, the first commercial web browser,
Netscape, became available. "



Ker Than, "The Internet Turns Forty," National
Geographic News, October 29, 2009