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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: First text message sent (3/12/1992)
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2024 08:47:36 +1300
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 5/12/2024 7:01 a.m., Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2024-12-03 08:59:10 +0000, Ross Clark said:
> 
>> 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"
> 
> "Mr. Watson come here, I want you" is bit more impressive as a first 
> message.
> 

or "What hath God wrought" (first Morse-code message transmitted, 1844, 
to officially open the Baltimore–Washington telegraph line)