It is difficult to exactly track the first steps of the networking technology that laid the foundation for today’s Internet, but most experts consider the ARPART as the major ancestor to our current Internet. This network was funded by DARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency of the US Department of Defense. The first experiments started in the late 1960s with the installation of a few ARPANET nodes in US universities and labs.

On 29 October 1969, the first documented ARPANET message was sent from the ARPANET node located at UCLA in Los Angeles to another node located at SRI in the bay area. The photograph below shows a copy of the UCLA logbook.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First-arpanet-imp-log.jpg)

Fifty years later, several events were organised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Internet:

• a day long event at UCLA
• a shorter seminar in France

The video of the event hosted at UCLA is available on Youtube with several Internet pioneers)

The Computer History Museum has started to publish a series of interesting blog posts on this anniversary as well.

*This blog post was written to inform the readers of Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice about the evolution of the field. You can subscribe to the Atom feed for this blog.