Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Global Age

First packet-switching network — DARPA / BBN

1969 AD · Transmission: Global
ComputingInventionNorth American

On 29 October 1969 the first message between ARPANET nodes was sent: "LO," the first two characters of "LOGIN" before the system crashed. It was the beginning of the network that would demonstrate that packet switching could connect heterogeneous computers in a decentralized, robust way. ARPANET was funded by DARPA for military and academic purposes, and grew during the 1970s as a university research network. The transition to TCP/IP in 1983 marked the formal birth of the internet. In the Wikinventia genealogy, ARPANET is the node where computing ceases to be a local machine and becomes communication infrastructure.

InstitutionDARPA / UCLA / Stanford Research Institute
Historical regionUnited States
Primary sourceFirst message between ARPANET nodes (UCLA → Stanford Research Institute), 29 October 1969.
Secondary sourceLeiner, B. et al. — "A Brief History of the Internet" (ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2009)
Original languageEnglish
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