On October 29, 1969, 55 years ago, Charley Kline, a student at the University of California, attempted to send the message “login” to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute. This was done via the first connection on the Arpanet, which can be considered the predecessor of today’s Internet and was used by the United States Department of Defense. However, shortly after pressing the letter “o”, the network crashed. As a result, Professor Bill Duval of Stanford University only received the letters “lo”. This short message was the first exchange ever made on the Internet, thanks to the work of a small team at the University of California, UCLA, consisting of Professor Leonard Kleinrock and student Kline. About an hour later, after the network had recovered from the outage, the complete message was finally successfully sent.

In 1969, only four universities had computers connected to the network: UCLA, Stanford, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The Arpanet served to connect these academic institutions engaged in projects for the Department of Defense under the Arpa program (now known as Darpa), dedicated to the development of new military technologies. Only two years after this historic event, in 1971, Ray Tomlinson of MIT sent the first e-mail. Meanwhile, in 1989, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee conceived the World Wide Web in theoretical form at CERN in Geneva; the first web page was published in 1991.

Today it is difficult to imagine the evolution that has taken place over the years. For example, on WhatsApp – one of the many tools for sending messages – users have reached two billion and approximately 100 billion messages are exchanged every day.