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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: First text message sent (3/12/1992)
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2024 21:59:10 +1300
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Sent (says Crystal) by Neil Papworth (using a personal computer) to 
RIchard Jarvis in Newbury, Berkshire (using an Orbitel 901, which 
weighed over 4 pounds). It said: "Merry Christmas".

In Werner Herzog's 2016 film "Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected 
World", Prof.Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the first message sent 
on ARPANET. On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock and his student Charley Kline 
were at an SDS Sigma 7 computer in the engineering school at UCLA, 
getting ready to send a message:

"All we wanted to do was log in from our computer to a computer 400 
miles to the north up at Stanford Research Institute.
To log in, you have to type "L O G" and that machine was smart enough to 
type the "I N".
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.
So Charlie typed the "L" and said "You get the 'L'?"
Bill said, "Yup, got the L."
Typed 'O'. "You get the 'O'?"
"Yup, got the 'O'."
Typed in the 'G' and crash! The SRI computer crashed.
So the first message ever on the internet was "LO", as in "lo and behold"