A first message between two hosts opens a network
A programmer at UCLA typed the first characters sent between two host computers on ARPANET, addressed to a machine at Stanford Research Institute. The connection failed after two letters, and the network it began carried everything afterward.
Entry 16 of 164 in the record
What happened
The arrangement was modest. Two sites had been joined through refrigerator-sized interface machines built by an outside contractor, and the test was to log in remotely from one to the other. Charley Kline, a student working in Leonard Kleinrock's group, began typing the login command while a colleague at the far end confirmed each character over the telephone. The receiving system crashed after the first two letters. A fix followed within the hour, the login went through, and by the end of the year four sites in the western United States were connected.
Nobody on the project was thinking about entertainment. The network existed to share expensive computers among research contractors, and the traffic it was designed for was file transfer, remote login and, unexpectedly, mail. Games arrived anyway, because the people with access were the same people who wrote programs for fun. A maze shooter played between linked machines, a cave exploration program that spread from site to site, and the mailing lists where players argued about both all turned up within a few years.
Everything built on shared networks since descends from this connection, and the games are a small part of it. Multiplayer worlds, matchmaking services, digital storefronts, patch delivery, streaming and the conversation around all of them run on the packet-switched approach demonstrated that evening. It is worth remembering how unglamorous the moment was: two letters, a crash, a phone call, and a line in a log book that has since become one of the most quoted documents in computing.
The world at the time
Computers in 1969 were expensive, mutually incompatible and isolated, and sharing one usually meant traveling to it. A defense research agency funded a project to link machines by breaking messages into packets that could find their own route, an idea plenty of established engineers doubted. Four university and research sites were slated for the first network, with equipment installed through the autumn.
Historical significance
Online play needed a network before it needed anything else. This is the first working demonstration of general-purpose communication between distant host computers, and every later form of connected gaming, from university dungeon worlds to global shooters, rests on the approach proved here.
What it changed
The network grew through the 1970s, adopted the protocols that became the internet, and passed into civilian and then commercial hands. Games followed the connectivity at every stage. The gap between this test and the first commercial online services is instructive, since the technology existed for roughly two decades before most players had any way to reach it.
Sources consulted
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
- Brief History of the Internet
- ARPANET
Listed sources support the facts in this entry. Wording throughout is original to this archive. Read more about how entries are researched in sources and methodology.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026. Report a correction