Happy 45th Birthday, Internet

On this day ... October 29th ... the first email message was sent via what was then known as "Arpanet."  Good trivia question: What was in that email?

"lo"

And where was it sent from?

Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Arpanet, a linked network of computers created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for the US Department of Defense, was one of the first networks to use “packet switching”, a system that allowed several machines to communicate over a single circuit, instead of having a dedicated link between two computers.

At 10:30pm on 29 October, this was demonstrated by sending a message from UCLA in Los Angeles to SRI in San Francisco. The message was meant to be “login”, but a system crash after two letters meant that it was, in fact, “lo”. The full five-letter message was successfully sent an hour or so later.