Professor Leonard Kleinrock: [Recalling the first internet message] Now, what was that first message? Many people don't know this.
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: All we wanted to do was log in from our computer to a computer 400 miles to the north up at Stanford Research Institute.
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: To log in, you have to type "L O G" and that machine was smart enough to type the "I N".
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: To make sure this was happening properly, we had our programmer and the programmer up north connected by a telephone handset, just to make sure it was going correctly.
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: So Charlie typed the "L"
[Mimicking the conversation over the telephone handset]
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: and said "You get the 'L'?"
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: Bill said, "Yup, got the L."
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: Typed 'O'.
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: "You get the 'O'?"
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: "Yup, got the 'O'."
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: Typed in the 'G' and crash! The SRI computer crashed.
Professor Leonard Kleinrock: So the first message ever on the internet was "LO", as in "lo and behold". We couldn't have asked for a more succinct, more powerful, more prophetic message than "LO".
