Internet Began 30 Years Ago at UCLA

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Internet at UCLA.

It was on the UCLA campus in 1969 that the first Internet connection was established, ushering in a new method of communication that today spans the globe and touches the lives of millions worldwide.

The federal government chose UCLA to become the first node of what was then known as the ARPANET because the faculty included Professor Leonard Kleinrock, whose research into "packet switching" provided the technological foundation upon which the network was to be built.

The ARPANET — which later became the Internet — was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created in 1958 to support scientific research in the United States. Its creation was prompted by the Soviet Union’s success in placing the "Sputnik" satellite in space.

ARPA had been supporting a number of computer scientists around the country in the 1960s. As each new researcher was added, ARPA had to provide him with a computer, and each researcher asked for all the special capabilities that existed in the many unique computers that ARPA was supporting. By connecting the existing computers together via a data network, ARPA officials reasoned, the community of scientists would be able to gain access to the special features of all those specialized computers.

The first network switch, known as an Interface Message Processor (IMP), arrived at UCLA on the Labor Day weekend 1969. The UCLA team led by Kleinrock had to connect the first host computer to the IMP. This was a challenging task since no such connection had ever been attempted before. However, by the end of that first day, bits began moving between the UCLA computer and the IMP. By the next day, researchers had messages moving between the machines.

"Little did those pioneers realize what they had created," Kleinrock said, reflecting upon history. "In fact, most of the ARPA-supported researchers were opposed to joining the network for fear that it would enable outsiders to load down their ‘private’ computers," he added.

By December 1969, four sites were connected: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. UCLA was in charge of conducting a series of extensive tests to debug the network. Under Kleinrock’s supervision, UCLA served for many years as the ARPANET Network Measurement Center.

In one ambitious experiment during the mid-1970s, researchers at UCLA were able to control a geosynchronous satellite hovering over the Atlantic Ocean by sending messages through the network from California to an East Coast satellite dish.

Ten nodes spanning the United States had been connected by the summer of 1970. Kleinrock noted that the Cambridge-based computer company which designed the original IMP — Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) — never imagined there would be a need for more than 64 host computers in the network and provided only that number of connections. Today, of course, there are over 50 million computers attached to the Internet — and that number is expanding at a phenomenal rate; moreover, traffic on the Internet doubles every 100 days.

Curiously enough, electronic mail (e-mail), which today is a major component of the network traffic, was an ad-hoc, add-on to the network in those early days, Kleinrock said.

The ARPANET evolved into the Internet in the 1980s and was discovered by the commercial world toward the end of that decade. Originally conceived and built by — and for — the scientific research community, it is dominated today by the commercial sector.

"Indeed, no one in those early days predicted how enormously successful and pervasive data networking would become," Kleinrock said.