ARPANET IMP Log Book
Year First Appeared
1969
Creator
Leonard Kleinrock, Charley Kline, Bill Duvall
The handwritten logbook from UCLA's Boelter Hall (Room 3420) documenting the first message transmission over ARPANET on October 29, 1969. This historic record captures the moment when two networked computers first communicated, marking the technological genesis of the modern internet.
Importance in Internet Culture
Documents the first successful host-to-host connection on ARPANET at 10:30 PM on October 29, 1969. The transmission of lo (the first two letters of login before a system crash) represents the birth of networked digital communication. RFC 1 itself inaugurated the open, iterative publication process that became the Internet's standardization backbone.
Interesting Fact
The iconic first message lo was a system failure, the SDS 940 at Stanford crashed after only two characters of login were transmitted. It took about an hour to restore the connection. Leonard Kleinrock later noted they couldn't have asked for a more succinct, more prophetic, more powerful message than lo, as in lo and behold.