Then it crashed halfway. Fifty-five years later, they sat down with the news.
Charley Kline and Bill Duvall were two bright-eyed engineers at the forefront of one of the most ambitious technological endeavors during the height of the Cold War. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or Arpanet, was the name of the system that Kline, a 21-year-old graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Duvall, a 29-year-old systems programmer at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), were developing. The project, which was funded by the US Department of Defense, sought to establish a network that could exchange data directly without the need for phone lines.
Instead, this system used a method of data delivery called “packet switching” that would later form the basis for the modern internet.
It was the first test of a technology that would change almost every facet of human life. But before it could work, you had to log in.
Kline sat at his keyboard between the lime-green walls of UCLA’s Boelter Hall Room 3420, prepared to connect with Duvall, who was working a computer halfway across the state of California. But Kline didn’t even make it all the way through the word “L-O-G-I-N” before Duvall told him over the phone that his system crashed. Thanks to that error, the first “message” that Kline sent Duvall on that autumn day in 1969 was simply the letters “L-O”.
