I was born the year before ARPANET. Article at Fast Company on the 50th Anniversary of the first message sent.
[Mark Sullivan] When I visited UCLA’s Boelter Hall last Wednesday, I took the stairs to the third floor, looking for Room 3420. And then I walked right by it. From the hallway, it’s a pretty unassuming place.
But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California. It was the beginning of ARPANET, the small network of academic computers that was the precursor to the internet.
[…]
Even back in 1969, many people had helped set the stage for Kline’s and Duvall’s breakthrough on the night of October 29–including UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, whom I spoke with along with Kline and Duvall as the 50th anniversary approached.
In 1973 Vint Cerf was asked to work on a protocol to replace the original NCP protocol. The new protocol is now known as TCP/IP. Of course, everyone had to move from NCP to TCP and that was outlined in RFC801. At the time (1982 and 1983) there were around 200 to 250 hosts on the ARPANET, yet that transition was still a major undertaking.
Finally, on January 1st, 1983, fourteen years after that first packet flowed, the NCP protocol was retired and TCP/IP was enabled. The ARPANET got what would become the Internet’s first large scale addressing scheme (IPv4).
“This is a guest post by Steve Crocker of Shinkuro, Inc. and Bill Duvall of Consulair. Fifty years ago they were both present when the first packets flowed on the Arpanet.” https://blog.cloudflare.com/fifty-years-ago/
I’m adding this here instead of posting it as a new topic. Dr Julian Onions in a Computerphile Video talking about connecting Nottingham to the internet.
Article at Fast Company on the 50th Anniversary of the first message sent.