The precursor to the Internet carried its first login request on October 29, 1969. //

On October 29, 1969, at 10:30pm Pacific Time, the first two letters were transmitted over ARPANET. And then it crashed. About an hour later, after some debugging, the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet.

Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA), ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack. But as Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET put it:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them. //

The first letters transmitted, sent from UCLA to Stanford by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, were "l" and "o." On the second attempt, the full message text, login, went through from the Sigma 7 to the 940. So, the first three characters ever transmitted over the precursor to the Internet were L, O, and L. //

When it was shut down, Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the modern Internet, wrote a poem in ARPANET's honor:

It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.