LO

From the Guardian G2 Special 'The Internet Turns 40' 23/10/09

It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is. But 29 October 1969 has a strong claim for being, as Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, outs it today "the day the infant internet uttered its first words". At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP (interface message processor), which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message. Samuel Morse, sending the first telegraph message 125 years previously, chose the portentous phrase: "What hath God wrought?" But Kline's task was to log in remotely from LA to the Stanford machine, and there was no opportunity for portentousness: his instructions were to type the command LOGIN. Still, Klienrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with is opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
"Have you got the L?" he asked, down the phone line. "Got the L," the voice at Stanford replied.
Kleine typed an O. "Have you got the O?"
"Got the O," Stanford replied.
Kliene typed at G, at which point the system crashed, and the connection was lost. The G didn't make it through, which meant that, quite by accident, the first message ever transmitted accross the nascent internet turned out, after all, to be fittingly biblical:
"LO."

Oliver Burkeman

I love this story.