People tend to think of the internet as a fairly recent invention especially when it comes to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.  So it’s difficult to believe that yesterday the 29th October 2009 marked the 40th anniversary of the first ever ‘email’ on the internet.

As you might expect the internet wasn’t quite as advanced as it is today and as the first message was sent, the system crashed. The system was called APRANET and designed in UCLA in the US, at the height of the cold war.  The first message to be sent between host computers was supposed to say ‘logon’. Yet again this caused a crash and the message that sent just said ‘lo’ an eerie precursor for the renowned internet and text talk ‘LOL’. The message was sent from ‘father of the internet’ Prof Leonard Kleinrock;s lab at UCLA and Douglas Englebert’s lab at Stanford Research Institute, using Interface Message Processors, the back bone of the internet.

Prof Kleinrock said ‘We succeeded in transmitting the L and the O and then the system crashed. ‘Hence, the first message on the internet was ‘’LO’’ as in ‘’Lo and behold’’. We didn’t plan it, but we couldn’t have come up with a better message: short and prophetic. ‘

He added  ‘I am not surprised the internet provides anyone with the ability to connect from any location at any time with any device and is invisible. But I am surprised at how far the internet has penetrated our lives and society.’

However the official birthday is in some dispute, with some scholars citing the September 2, 1969 transmission of meaningless data between the UCLA and SRI computers.