First text message sent (3/12/1992)

[Ross Clark]

Sent (says Crystal) by Neil Papworth (using a personal computer) to
RIchard Jarvis in Newbury, Berkshire (using an Orbitel 901, which
weighed over 4 pounds). It said: "Merry Christmas".

In Werner Herzog's 2016 film "Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected
World", Prof.Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the first message sent
on ARPANET. On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock and his student Charley Kline
were at an SDS Sigma 7 computer in the engineering school at UCLA,
getting ready to send a message:

"All we wanted to do was log in from our computer to a computer 400
miles to the north up at Stanford Research Institute.
To log in, you have to type "L O G" and that machine was smart enough to
type the "I N".
To make sure this was happening properly, we had our programmer and the
programmer up north connected by a telephone handset, just to make sure
it was going correctly.
So Charlie typed the "L" and said "You get the 'L'?"
Bill said, "Yup, got the L."
Typed 'O'. "You get the 'O'?"
"Yup, got the 'O'."
Typed in the 'G' and crash! The SRI computer crashed.
So the first message ever on the internet was "LO", as in "lo and behold"

[Aidan Kehoe]

[...] "All we wanted to do was log in from our computer to a computer 400
miles to the north up at Stanford Research Institute.
To log in, you have to type "L O G" and that machine was smart enough to
type the "I N".
To make sure this was happening properly, we had our programmer and the
programmer up north connected by a telephone handset, just to make sure it
was going correctly.
So Charlie typed the "L" and said "You get the 'L'?"
Bill said, "Yup, got the L."
Typed 'O'. "You get the 'O'?"
"Yup, got the 'O'."
Typed in the 'G' and crash! The SRI computer crashed.
So the first message ever on the internet was "LO", as in "lo and behold"

Reminds me of ‘ghrelin’, a hormone of the gastrointestinal tract, asserted to
be from Proto-Indo-European “gʰreh₁”, ‘to grow’, but suspiciously similar to
the abbreviation ‘Growth Hormone RELeasing’ peptide, its function.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Post by Ross Clark
Sent (says Crystal) by Neil Papworth (using a personal computer) to
RIchard Jarvis in Newbury, Berkshire (using an Orbitel 901, which
weighed over 4 pounds). It said: "Merry Christmas".
In Werner Herzog's 2016 film "Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected
World", Prof.Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the first message
sent on ARPANET. On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock and his student Charley
Kline were at an SDS Sigma 7 computer in the engineering school at
"All we wanted to do was log in from our computer to a computer 400
miles to the north up at Stanford Research Institute.
To log in, you have to type "L O G" and that machine was smart enough
to type the "I N".
To make sure this was happening properly, we had our programmer and the
programmer up north connected by a telephone handset, just to make sure
it was going correctly.
So Charlie typed the "L" and said "You get the 'L'?"
Bill said, "Yup, got the L."
Typed 'O'. "You get the 'O'?"
"Yup, got the 'O'."
Typed in the 'G' and crash! The SRI computer crashed.
So the first message ever on the internet was "LO", as in "lo and behold"

"Mr. Watson come here, I want you" is bit more impressive as a first message.

[Ross Clark]

Post by Athel Cornish-Bowden

Post by Ross Clark
Sent (says Crystal) by Neil Papworth (using a personal computer) to
RIchard Jarvis in Newbury, Berkshire (using an Orbitel 901, which
weighed over 4 pounds). It said: "Merry Christmas".
In Werner Herzog's 2016 film "Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected
World", Prof.Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the first message
sent on ARPANET. On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock and his student
Charley Kline were at an SDS Sigma 7 computer in the engineering
"All we wanted to do was log in from our computer to a computer 400
miles to the north up at Stanford Research Institute.
To log in, you have to type "L O G" and that machine was smart enough
to type the "I N".
To make sure this was happening properly, we had our programmer and
the programmer up north connected by a telephone handset, just to make
sure it was going correctly.
So Charlie typed the "L" and said "You get the 'L'?"
Bill said, "Yup, got the L."
Typed 'O'. "You get the 'O'?"
"Yup, got the 'O'."
Typed in the 'G' and crash! The SRI computer crashed.
So the first message ever on the internet was "LO", as in "lo and behold"

"Mr. Watson come here, I want you" is bit more impressive as a first message.

or "What hath God wrought" (first Morse-code message transmitted, 1844,
to officially open the Baltimore–Washington telegraph line)