A Message Was the Medium at UCLA
“I thought the network would be useful,” Len Kleinrock was saying. “What I didn’t realize was that one day my 97-year-old mother would be on the Internet.”
Kleinrock, a youthful 70-year-old with the frame of a marathon runner and a voice that still has its New York edge, was in the office he keeps as professor of computer science at UCLA, looking back at the 35 years that have passed since he and a team of graduate students helped launch the global network.
The date was Oct. 29, 1969, which Kleinrock has striven to establish as the Internet’s birthday to underscore UCLA’s important role in its creation. On Friday, the university sponsored a daylong symposium to mark the anniversary of the moment a UCLA computer sent the very first message over the Internet’s direct precursor, Arpanet, a research network funded by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Among the participants were members of Kleinrock’s original team, including MCI Corp.’s Vinton Cerf, who has continued to nurture his handiwork for more than three decades.
That they participated doesn’t mean they agree with Kleinrock’s chronology, however. As is the case with any complex invention, establishing the Internet’s birthday depends on which aspect of the phenomenon one chooses as the most important.
“One could argue that it was born when TCP was invented in 1973,” Kleinrock says, naming the communications protocol that Cerf co-developed to facilitate the transmission of data files. “Or when e-mail was introduced in 1972. Or when the World Wide Web was implemented in 1989.”
At UCLA, he says, “we argue that it was when the first message was sent between two hosts. That’s when the Internet took its first breath and uttered its first words.”
UCLA’s involvement arose from the system’s original architecture. Computer hardware and software were not as standardized as they are today, when one finds PCs running Microsoft Windows software almost everywhere. Research institutions employed scores of architecturally incompatible big computers. Getting these distinctive machines to speak directly to one another would have been a superhuman task. Instead, ARPA opted to create a network of “Interface Message Processors,” or IMPs -- separate, identical computers that served as interpreters.
IMP No. 1, a gray steel box resembling a home refrigerator but armored like a Sherman tank, had been installed in Boelter Hall, the campus engineering building, and wired to its host computer. On Oct. 29, 1969, it began transmitting the message “LOGIN” over telephone lines to a sister IMP at the private Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. The UCLA operators got as far as “LO,” and the SRI machine crashed.
Later that day the operators fixed the flaw and completed the message. Within a year, Arpanet linked 10 hosts spanning the country.
IMP 1, long since decommissioned, still occupies a room across the hall from Kleinrock’s office, perched atop a wheeled dolly. “We offered it to the Smithsonian in 1989 and they didn’t want it.” Kleinrock says. “In 1999 they wanted it, but they wouldn’t promise to keep it on display.” His current plan is to install it inside a proposed new campus engineering building.
In 1989, UCLA commemorated the first IMP transmission with a 20th-anniversary symposium for an audience of scientists and engineers. “The Internet wasn’t known to everybody then,” Kleinrock says.
Ten years later, however, the network had evolved into a public sensation. The 1999 symposium took place in the teeth of the dot-com boom. “We were king of the hill,” Kleinrock recalls.
Now, five years after that, the boom -- and bust -- is a memory, and the atmosphere is “more mature, more sober,” Kleinrock says. Gone is the smugness with which Web insiders labeled any dot-com a sure thing and mocked companies reliant on bricks and mortar as “road kill.” Today, the Web is recognized as a tool rather than an end in itself -- useful if wisely exploited, useless if handled badly.
But it is also something else at this point: practically indispensable. Kleinrock believes that the last crucial elements needed to turn the Web into a global utility are on the verge of realization.
These include the ability to plug into the system from anywhere, with any device, which he calls “nomadic” computing. The first glimmers of nomadic computing can be seen in the spread of wireless “hot spots” and other uses of Wi-Fi technology -- a trend Kleinrock tries to exploit through Nomadix Inc., which he founded in 1998 to develop applications to manage wireless networks.
On the other hand, the network’s success comes with what he calls the “dark side.”
“That’s the wild card,” he says. “Spam, viruses, invasions of privacy, pornography.” These turn upside down the original design’s virtues: its ability to reach millions of users instantly and at virtually no cost, its anonymity, its lack of centralized authority. Such principles worked well when Arpanet served a community of like-minded scientists, but they leave a public network vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous.
“I wonder if, knowing then what we know now, we would have changed the rules of engagement,” Kleinrock says.
Still, the old rules are what allow the Internet to be continuously retailored to suit the needs and desires of new generations.
Not long ago, Kleinrock, who had relied on the Net to maintain cross-country communications with his grandchildren, started wondering why they had stopped responding to his e-mail. “Kids don’t read e-mail anymore,” one of their parents told him. “They’re all on instant messaging.”
Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.
