LO IS THE FIRST INTERNET MESSAGE L O These two little letters were the start of something big They changed the way people communicate work shop play learn and even elect leaders LO was the first message sent over the first computer network That network would become the Internet COMPUTERS IN 1969 Today people carry powerful computers around in their book bags or pockets In 1969 computers were enormous Charley Kline’s computer was approximately the size of a refrigerator It weighed more than 900 pounds 408 kg The host or main computer was much bigger His computer acted like a bridge between the host computer and the one at Stanford It was a few days before Halloween in 1969 Charley Kline was a student at the University of California Los Angeles UCLA He phoned a scientist at the Stanford Research 74 8 Percentage of US homes with Internet access in 2012 up from 18 percent in 1997 A researcher at UCLA sent the first Internet message and a scientist at Stanford Research Institute received it Their computers were hundreds of miles apart These were the first two computers in a network called ARPANET ARPANET would form the backbone of the Internet
Institute hundreds of miles away Both of them were sitting in front of computer terminals Kline typed in a letter L on his keyboard He asked the man on the phone Did you get the L He did No one had sent a message over a computer network before Kline was making history In the late 1960s computers did not ask users to log in with a name and password The computer waited for a command Kline was typing a command L-O-G-I-N He pressed the O key Did you get the O he asked The other man said yes The room and equipment used to send the first Internet message Kline typed a G The computer on the other end crashed Kline did not complete his command Still he and the Stanford scientist had done the important and amazing part They had created the first computer network It was called ARPANET Scientists working for the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA invented ARPANET By 1981 ARPANET connected more than 200 military and university computers During the 1980s and 1990s the network linked with other networks around the world growing into the Internet we know today
THE FIRST WEB PAGE GOES LIVE IN 1990 Nothing blinked moved or made a sound There were no photos or videos The page had a stark white background with a few words in black A few in blue linked to other pages The first web page was pretty plain But it changed how we use the Internet Until 1990 people could share data files and messages on the Internet However nothing linked all of the information together Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN a large Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web
Swiss research facility Years earlier he coded a program to keep track of all of the computers files and people at CERN It helped him find information when he needed it Berners-Lee wondered if he could do the same thing for the Internet Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 He came up with the idea to give every document an address He called that address a Uniform Resource Locator URL The URL tells other computers where to find the web page or document on the Early web browsers changed the way people thought about the Internet 1 billion Estimated number of web pages in July 2014 The first web page was very simple Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web The World Wide Web made it possible to connect information together Internet This allows pages to be linked together into a World Wide Web Berners-Lee created the first web page on Christmas Day in 1990 MOSAIC The World Wide Web was not very popular at first People did not immediately realize the web was the ideal way to organize the Internet It took a web browser called Mosaic to make them see the potential of the World Wide Web A year after Mosaic was launched web traffic increased 10,000-fold Some people say that Mosaic made the Internet boom of the 1990s possible
