ARPANET sent its first message on 29 October 1969 from a lab at UCLA to a machine at Stanford, and the message was supposed to read 'LOGIN' — but the system crashed after the L and the O, meaning the first word ever transmitted over the network that became the internet was, by accident, 'LO'. (opens in new tab)

At 10:30 p.m. on 29 October 1969, a graduate student named Charley Kline sat at a Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 computer in Room 3420 of Boelter Hall at UCLA and tried to log into a machine 350 miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. He typed an L. The receiving end, monitored by SRI […]