'Lo world

October 29, 2009 11:26 AM

Forty years ago today, Leonard Kleinrock and a team of engineers at UCLA connected to Stanford Research Institute and typed (an incomplete) message between the first two nodes of the Internet: "lo."

Kleinrock tells the story. The first router. On packet switching. (All YouTube)

Kleinrock interviewed by CNN, LA Times.

Sign outside the historic room at UCLA.

History of the Internet.

posted by starman (35 comments total)

I knew the internet was old, but I hadn't realized that it dated back as far as the Flintstones' era.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:30 AM on October 29 [3 favorites has favorites]

We succeeded in transmitting the "l" and the "o" and then the system crashed!

Truly ahead of their time. This still describes much of my daily computer interactions.
posted by GuyZero at 11:31 AM on October 29 [3 favorites has favorites]

We succeeded in transmitting the "l" and the "o" and then the system crashed!

lo
posted by DU at 11:32 AM on October 29 [1 favorite has favorites]

-lcats
posted by battleshipkropotkin at 11:42 AM on October 29 [14 favorites has favorites]

Kind of a shame it was "login" that got cut short rather than "Lo! Let ARPANET be!"
posted by Electric Dragon at 11:43 AM on October 29

Lo and Behold What Hath IMP Wrought
posted by stbalbach at 11:43 AM on October 29

Twitter was even more character-restrictive back then.
posted by yeti at 11:45 AM on October 29 [4 favorites has favorites]

Come here, Watson! I have a method of enlarging your penis!
posted by Joe Beese at 11:46 AM on October 29 [29 favorites has favorites]

Come here, Watson! I have a method of enlarging your penis!

Well, to be historically accurate, it was "Come here, Watson! I'll tell you how to get a green card."
posted by GuyZero at 11:51 AM on October 29 [4 favorites has favorites]

HEL
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:18 PM on October 29

"lo."

tl;dr
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:19 PM on October 29 [7 favorites has favorites]

*waves back casually* 'Lo.
posted by wanderingmind at 12:22 PM on October 29

Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield. Wingfield had built the hardware interface between the UCLA computer and the IMP, the machines were connected, and within a couple of days of delivery the IMP was communicating with the local NMC host, an SDS Sigma 7 computer running the SEX operating system.

Must be why the internet has so much porn.
posted by delmoi at 12:24 PM on October 29

If I understand the ways of the Internet, they were well on their way to calling someone else a lo-ser when the system crashed. Either that or they were laughing out loud.
posted by mannequito at 12:26 PM on October 29

These were old-school command-line systems. "lo" was actually the command that reset all the job queues, ran some core memory tests and changed the ribbon on the line printer. No wonder it crashed.
posted by GuyZero at 12:35 PM on October 29

And it's been downhill ever since.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 1:29 PM on October 29

In a few thousand years when LolBible is taken srsly, scholars will have debates about whether the original message "lo" was pronounced "ell oh", "lowe", or "lah". Each have slightly different meanings in Hebrew. On one hand, Ceiling Cat, the Creator of the internets, certainly would have said "ell oh", short for "laughing out." the Great laughing out. On the other hand, "lo" as in "lawl" is the first syllable of "Lahweh," lolspeak for "Yahweh." It crashed before the second syllable could be uttered, because that is the name which cannot be spoken. Although some think Basement cat may caused it to crash just for the lols.
posted by water bear at 1:35 PM on October 29 [7 favorites has favorites]

MetaFilter: place insert under canary sheet before writing
posted by Nelson at 3:35 PM on October 29

Must be why the internet has so much porn.

Theres ... there's porn on the Internet? If this is true I've been wasting my life up to now. One moment, I must go verify this allegation.
posted by sebastienbailard at 3:38 PM on October 29

...anyone seen sebastienbailard?
posted by lazaruslong at 3:45 PM on October 29

lol
posted by infini at 5:09 PM on October 29

"It was 40 years ago today
Mr. Kleinrock taught the baud to play"
posted by happyroach at 5:46 PM on October 29 [3 favorites has favorites]

That was it. That was the beginning. The very first flicker of a pulse.

From there it grew. Other other nodes. Other routers.

Slowly, at first, but taking hold, digging in, with lines of cable and code it grew in scope and size and then one day, it was the Internet.

The Internet.

And the Internet birthed this place, and this place birthed us, sitting here, reading this, talking to each other, having these great discussions and learning from each other.

Absolutely fantastic.
posted by kbanas at 6:05 PM on October 29

lo l a loooolaaaa!
posted by SPrintF at 6:39 PM on October 29

My God, it's full of ...
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:03 PM on October 29 [1 favorite has favorites]

That was it. That was the beginning. The very first flicker of a pulse.

From there it grew. Other other nodes. Other routers.

Slowly, at first, but taking hold, digging in, with lines of cable and code it grew in scope and size and then one day, it was the Internet.

The Internet.

And the Internet birthed this place, and this place birthed us, sitting here, reading this, talking to each other, having these great discussions and learning from each other.


Coming this summer from acclaimed writer James A. Michener: THE INTERNET
posted by padraigin at 9:37 PM on October 29

lo

-lcats

Teamwork!
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 10:26 PM on October 29

That was it. That was the beginning. The very first flicker of a pulse.

Wait -- they invented Flickr?
posted by grubi at 5:50 AM on October 30

I don't know why you say goodbye,; I say l-o.
posted by grubi at 5:51 AM on October 30 [1 favorite has favorites]

"It was 40 years ago today
Mr. Kleinrock taught the baud to play"

You say goodbye
And I say 'l o'.
posted by chrismear at 6:21 AM on October 30

That'll teach me to leave a web page open for half an hour. Forty year old technology and I still haven't got the hang of it.
posted by chrismear at 6:22 AM on October 30

l o goodbye l o goodyyyye
l o goodbyye
l o goodbye
posted by grubi at 6:50 AM on October 30

Save yourselves while you still can! It's too late for m....
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:34 PM on October 30

Lo Bob!
posted by msbutah at 2:33 PM on October 30

I took my first programming courses in 1980-81 at a small college in Texas. We had a PDP-11 at our school, but apparently we didn't have the advanced mathematical subroutines required for the course I was taking.

We had a few dumb terminals that connected to the big computing center at UT, where our (Fortran) programs were compiled. The modem was about the size of a washing machine. The comm speed was insanely low, probably a few hundred baud. Communication was through phone lines, and if it was raining between us and Austin we'd get errors ("PARITY ERROR. LINE IGNO" it would say). Our school paid for use of the UT computer according to CPU time, which was measured in microseconds. We were thoroughly schooled in avoiding infinite loops.
posted by neuron at 8:09 PM on October 30