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The computer that sent the first email 40 years ago today crashed just two letters in, according to the scientist who sent it. Professor Leonard Kleinrock, 75, revealed the unfortunate event at anniversary celebrations held at the University of California, Los Angeles, dubbed 'the birthplace of the internet.'
The computer scientist recalled how he sent the very first message over the ARPANET, the computer network that later became known as the Internet.
That event, recognized today as the moment the Internet was born, ushered in a technological revolution that has dramatically transformed the world we live in.
'It's the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke,' he said.
On October 29, 1969 Kleinrock led a team that managed to send a message from a computer at UCLA to a research institute in San Francisco.
The message was to be the word 'login', however it did not all go to plan. 'We transmitted the ‘L’ … and the ‘O’ - and then the other computer crashed,' Kleinrock said.
The 1969 crash wasn't due to the message itself, but a memory problem with the receiving computer, Kleinrock said.
HOW THE INTERNET WAS BORN
In the 1960s UCLA had a time-shared computer (Sigma 7) that was used by students.
Scientists at University decided to create a network and had a switch built called an Interface Message Processor (now known as a router) that was the size of a fridge.
This was turned on on September 2 and sent messages back and forth between the two. In October, Standford Research Institute connected a host computer to their own IMP. Then a communication link was created between the two IMPs or routers.
'This was the first piece of a backbone network ever on the internet,' Professor Kleinrock (left) said.
On October 29, 1969, a team led by Professor Kleinrock attempted to log on from the UCLA machine to the SRI machine through the first network. They managed to send the letters L and O before it crashed.
The Internet pioneer said if he could go back in time he would have built more controls into the Internet to 'keep the "dark side" of things out'.
'I actually took part later in the first denial-of-service attack on the Internet as well. We sent the first spammer in 1984 so many messages, complaining, that we shut him down,' he said.
But the Professor said he was still immensely proud of the technological leap they made.
'The Internet is a democratizing element; everyone has an equivalent voice,' he said. 'There is no way back at this point. We can't turn it off. The Internet Age is here.'
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