Re: First text message sent (3/12/1992)

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.
--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly in England until 1987.