Event 1: Leonard Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site

Boelter 3420

When I looked through the list of events, I picked this event as my first choice for a personal reason. During the first student tour at UCLA in 2018, the student guide led my group to the Boelter Hall. Although we did not go inside the hall, she introduced the birthplace of the internet in a small laboratory in the basement of this building. Her words left me a profound impression of UCLA, and I am so proud that I am now studying at the birthplace of the internet. 

Beside the door of the room

View of the room from the front 

Located at 3420 Boelter Hall, this tiny room with lime green paint on the walls and the white ceiling is the place that the internet first emerged and later used by more than four billion people in this planet. My first impression of this room is its small size and simple infrastructure. Walking into the room at this point is like time traveling back to sixty years ago. Inside the room were carefully constructed dioramas and copies of computer artifacts. The computers in the early time were much larger and more expensive, and they are high energy consuming technology. 

Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock first presented the mathematical theory of "packet networks" when he was a graduate student at MIT, which breaks up data into smaller "packets" that can be sent over the Internet and make works more efficient. 

Packet Network

Bolt Beranek & Newman(BBN) built the famous Interface Message Processor for DARPA to install and pilot network using packet-switched technology. After building the IMP in 1969, BBN placed the first node of the network at UCLA.

IMP

On October 29, 1969, the ream at 3420 Boelter Hall tried to send the first message to Stanford Research Institute. They wanted to send the message: "LOGIN", but they only typed in the first two letters "LO" before the system crashed. The message sent successfully. 

This was the first time that two computers linked together across the country. From their successful experiment, ARPANET was created, and this launched the "Information Revolution" and became the foundation of the internet. From 1945 to 1975, the 3240 Boelter Hall was the site of ARPANET's first node and sent the first network message, and other researchers used their foundation and studied the network that became the modern Internet.

I will definitely recommend this event to all the people, not only students at UCLA because I personally really enjoyed the lab and getting a deep understanding of the history of the internet, and this is a great achievement and a turning point in the world that everyone should know. I think I learn that human needs creativity to discover the world. As long as you have creativity, you can create value beyond imagination. It's the spirit of creativity and emperiment that construct the devices in this room and make a breathing machine that makes the Internet “speaks” for the first time. Just like Leonard Kleinrock addressed, who can imagine how many revolutions have taken place in this small place?

Works Cited

Alexander Nelson. “Packet Switching Network Data Is Divided into Packets. Transfer of Information as Payload in Data Packets Packets Undergo Random Delays & Possible Loss. - Ppt Download.” SlidePlayer, 2017, slideplayer.com/slide/8457062/.

“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/arpanet.

“Internet Hall of Fame.” Leonard Kleinrock | Internet Hall of Fame, Internet Society, 2019, www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/leonard-kleinrock.

“Leonard Kleinrock.” Marconi Society, The Marconi Society, 2016, marconisociety.org/blog-authors/leonard-kleinrock/.

Global Commission. “One Internet.” Centre for International Governance Innovation, GLOBAL COMMISSION ON INTERNET GOVERNANCE, 21 June 2016, www.cigionline.org/publications/one-internet.