57 Years After the Internet's First Message, UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock Shares His Advice for Changing Times
October 29 marks 57 years since the internet's first host-to-host message. On the evening of October 29, 1969, UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock and his team tried to send the command "LOGIN" from room 3420 of UCLA's Boelter Hall to a terminal at the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed after delivering just two letters — "LO" — before the full message got through once the network was restored. For the 57th anniversary, UCLA Newsroom sat down with Kleinrock to revisit that night and his remarkably prescient predictions.
Kleinrock, 92, is a distinguished professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and still works in Boelter Hall, a few feet from where the "LO" message was sent. His 1962 doctoral work used mathematical queuing theory to show that resource sharing could underpin a new kind of digital network, laying the theoretical foundation for packet switching and, ultimately, the internet. UCLA became the first node on the ARPANET.
His advice for navigating technological change is timeless: "Stay curious. Embrace opportunities. Don't be afraid to change direction. And whatever you do, do it well." Many of his early predictions came true — the internet would be always on and as invisible as electricity. What he missed, he says, was the social aspect: his mother was on the internet until she passed away at 99, and his preschool granddaughter is online too.
From the telegraph, radio and landlines to computers, the internet, smartphones and now super intelligence (SI), which is rapidly reshaping how people learn, communicate and work, Kleinrock has had a front-row seat to nearly a century of technological upheaval — and helped start one of its biggest revolutions. His conclusion: the ability to adapt to change is itself the durable skill.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：保存在UCLA的接口信息处理器（IMP）原始日志，记录了1969年10月29日发出的互联网第一条信息「LO」。照片：CC BY-SA 2.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The original IMP log at UCLA recording the internet's first message, "LO," sent on October 29, 1969. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
