Happy Internet Day: The Message that Changed the World

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like without the Internet? A very important event is hours away. Oct. 29 celebrates a momentous occasion that forever changed the way the world communicates, travels, shops and learns. It's International Internet Day, also known as World Internet Day and/or Internet Day, an annual “holiday” that has been celebrated since 2005.

On this day back in 1969 in an empty computer lab at UCLA, the very first electronic message traveled from one computer to another. On October 29, 1969, at about 10:30 p.m., Computer Science Professor Leonard Kleinrock was supervising 21-year-old graduate student, Charley Kline, as Kline sent the first message over the Internet to fellow programmer, Bill Duvall.

Although the message was nothing inspirational, mind-boggling or life-changing, it was nonetheless, momentous. Kline typed the letters “L” and “O” which were both received by Duvall before the system crashed! Kleinrock said, “All we wanted to do ... was to send a simple login capability from UCLA to SRI. We just wanted to log into the SRI machine from UCLA."

The entire one-word message, “login," was finally sent in its entirety about an hour later and the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the network that would become the Internet, was born.

Since that day decades ago, it is estimated that more than 2 billion people use the Internet today. With over 7 billion people in the world today, Asia has the most Internet users, according to Internet World Stats.

October 29 is also National Cat Day!