Correction appended
Internet technology was pioneered at UCLA with a simple, two-lettered word: “lo.”
Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at UCLA, has been chosen by the National Science Foundation to receive the National Medal of Science for inventing “packet-switching,” the technology underlying the Internet.
“Not many people ask the question of what the first message to be sent from one computer to another is,” Kleinrock said. “It was sent between a computer at UCLA and one at the Stanford Research Institute, and all we wanted to do was log in from our computer to their computer.”
“To log in,” he continued, “You have to type “˜log.'”
But Kleinrock and his fellow UCLA researchers only got as far as typing the “l” and the “o” before the computer crashed.
“Lo, as in “˜lo and behold,'” he said. “What more provocative and predictive message could you have sent?”
Kleinrock said there was no written record of the event.
“The only record we had was in a log of activity in which the event is recorded that at 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 29, 1969, we connected host-to-host to SRI from UCLA. We sent the message.”
Correction: A previous version of this article gave an incorrect time in the above quote. The correct time is 10:30 p.m.
President George W. Bush will give Kleinrock the medal at the White House on Sept. 29.
Established by Congress in 1959, the medal is “one of the highest honors this country gives,” said Vijay K. Dhir, dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Kleinrock’s research began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he realized that computers needed to have some way to communicate with each other, he said.
Soon after receiving his doctorate in 1963, Kleinrock joined the UCLA faculty and received funding from the Advanced Research Project Agency.
“ARPA, previously called ARPANET and funded by the U.S. government’s Department of Defense in response to the Russian launching of Sputnik in 1956,” Kleinrock said. “They started funding a number of areas in computer science.”
UCLA became the first node of the ARPANET when the first network switch, known as an Interface Message Processor, was delivered to the university Labor Day weekend, he said.
“We were the first switch, and what that means is, we had a regular computer serving the computer science department (at UCLA),” he said. “That computer then connected to the first router, also called a packet switch, which let us talk to the emerging network so that our computer could communicate with another.”
A month later ““ on Oct. 29, 1969 ““ when the second node was installed at Stanford Research Institute, Kleinrock launched the first host-to-host message from UCLA.
Little by little, switches were developed and soon populated the Internet.
Kleinrock predicted the modern-day popularity in a press release dated July 3, 1969.
“As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy,” Kleinrock said in the statement. “But as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of “˜computer utilities,’ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country.”
To this day, Kleinrock continues to investigate the possibilities of Internet technology, focusing on social networks, wireless networks, advanced search technology, intelligent agents and advanced routing technology, he said.
But though he predicted the possibilities of the Internet in 1969, he then did not predict the social side of the Internet, he said.
It came to him in 1972 when e-mail was introduced to the Internet.
“What I missed was that my elderly mother would be on the Internet, which she was until she was 99,” he said.
According to the National Science Foundation’s Web site, he will receive the medal for his contribution to the mathematical theory of modern data networks, for mentoring generations of students, for leading the commercialization of technologies that have transformed the world, and for the functional specification of packet switching, which is the foundation of Internet technology.
There are several criteria that must be met to receive the award, including impact of research, recognition of peers and scientific contribution to the industry, said Lisa-Joy Zgorski, National Science Foundation public affairs specialist.
“It is an incredible honor to be among those award winners, and it’s a good way to get news of incredible contribution of science out there to the public,” Zgorski said. “These people are inspirational Americans ““ individuals who are devoting themselves to the improvement of science.
And it provides a happy alternative to a Nobel Prize, Kleinrock said.