It was the Saturday before the Labor Day* holiday and there were very few people at the university. But the whole UCLA network team was waiting outside the building. Vint Cerf had brought an expensive bottle of wine. It was immediately obvious that the box was too big to fit through the door. They had to take the IMP out of the box on the street. Everyone at UCLA was surprised by the size and weight of the IMP. It was about the size of a fridge and it weighed nearly five hundred kilograms. The team had been thinking about almost nothing apart from the IMP for nine months. But it was * Labor Day: a national holiday to honour working people. In the USA, Labor Day is on the first Monday in September.
still a shock to actually see it. Steve Crocker was part of the UCLA team: 'It's a little like seeing your parents invite to dinner someone that you've never met. You don't pay much attention until you discover that they actually want you to marry this strange person.' It took a few minutes to connect the IMP to the host computer. Then it was switched on. It began to run its software at exactly the same point where it had stopped back at BBN. Within an hour, the IMP and the host were exchanging information. •
The UCLA IMP and its host were the only machines on the network. Until another host computer was connected, the ARPAnet would not be a real network. One month later, on 1 October 1969, the second IMP was delivered to the Stanford Research Institute. The telephone lines were connected to both IMPs. Each IMP was connected to its host. Everything was turned on and the network was ready for its first message. Vint Cerf was at UCLA. First, he tried to 'log on' to the host computer at Stanford - this means typing in some instructions that obtain permission to run programs on a computer. A computer scientist like Cerf usually logged on to computers many times a day. But no one had ever logged on to another computer over a network before. As he typed at the keyboard, he also had a voice connection to the other engineer at Stanford. Cerf typed an 'L and spoke into the telephone: 'Did you get the "L"?' he asked. 'I got the "L",' said the other engineer. Cerf typed an ' O ' . 'What about that?' he asked. 'Did you get a n " 0 " ? ' 'I got an "O"'. So Cerf typed a 'G', to complete the first word ever sent over a network. 'Did you get the "G"?' he asked. 'Uh, no. N o "G" ...' The network had crashed. 'No problem!' said Vint Cerf. 'You got the "L" and the " O " . Say them together,"L-O". Sounds like "Hello!", doesn't it?' It only took a few more hours until the network worked properly. The first message was not important, but the event was. Despite all the theory and the tests which proved that the ARPAnet should work, the connection between UCLA and Stanford proved that the network did work. It was the first time that distant computers had ever talked to each other. The ARPAnet was the first computer network. Soon it would become the heart of a network of networks — the Internet.