The Internet's First Word Was "LO". Then It Crashed

The first message ever sent on the network that became the internet was "LO". The computer at the other end crashed before the G. October 1969, UCLA, a student named Charley Kline trying to log in to Stanford. Behind that failure sits a Cold War fear: one Soviet warhead could cut America's centralised phone network. Behind the fix sits a twenty-minute meeting at the Pentagon where Robert Taylor walked out with a million dollars. This is the chain of people who turned that into the thing you are using right now: Paul Baran and Donald Davies inventing packets on opposite sides of the Atlantic; Ray Tomlinson grabbing the unused @ key; Elizabeth Feinler keeping the directory of every host by hand; Cerf and Kahn forcing every machine to switch protocols on a single day in 1983; Tim Berners-Lee's proposal marked "vague but exciting"; and CERN giving the Web away, with zero royalties, forever. 00:00 L, O... crash 00:31 A network built to survive a nuclear strike 02:37 The IMP and the 50,000-dollar translator 04:16 Email, the @ sign and a hand-kept directory 06:03 Flag Day: switch or get cut off 07:48 When the phone book broke 09:29 "Vague but exciting" 11:37 Mosaic and the code CERN gave away 13:11 Owned by everyone, controlled by no one Two people in Urbana, Illinois changed the rest: undergraduate Marc Andreessen, 22, and staff programmer Eric Bina put images inside the page with Mosaic, and by August 1995 Netscape's stock offering had kicked off the dot-com era. The original ARPANET had already been switched off in 1990, after twenty-one years. Nobody owned what replaced it, and that was deliberate. If CERN had charged licence fees for the Web in 1993, what would the internet look like today?