Forty Years Of The Internet, Maoism, Yippies, Spiritual Communes & All That
October 29th, 1969 was the date of the first internet transmission. This is from the Computer Science school at UCLA.
“The Day the Infant Internet Uttered its First Words
Leonard Kleinrock
A record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET. It took place at 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969. This record is an excerpt from the “IMP Log” that we kept at UCLA. I was supervising the student/programmer Charley Kline (CSK) and we set up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The transmission itself was simply to “login” to SRI from UCLA. We succeeded in transmitting the “l” and the “o” and then the system crashed! Hence, the first message on the Internet was “Lo!”. We were able to do the full login about an hour later.”
Now we have second life on the internet. This was the infamous attempt to create a communications network that could survive a nuclear war.
The first three way communications was in 1977. This is from SRI International’s web site.
“The First Three-Network Transmission, 1977
1977 marked a critical milestone in the development of the modern Internet and wireless networking. While many people trace the Internet’s origins to the ARPANET of the late 1960s, the word “internet” means joining different kinds of individual networks together. Internetworking made its formal debut with the first connection across three dissimilar networks in 1977. SRI played a major role.
In the fall of that year, an unmarked step van filled with futuristic equipment, SRI engineers, and sometimes fully uniformed generals quietly cruised the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area. Only an oddly shaped antenna gave any hint of its purpose. A singular event occurred on November 22, when data flowed seamlessly through the van between SRI International in Menlo Park and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles via London, England, across three types of networks: Packet Radio, Satellite, and the ARPANET. Packet radio, being the first mobile digital radio, also foreshadowed WiFi and other kinds of wireless access.”
October 29th 1969 I was 15 years old and in my sophomore year of high school. I had not had my first sex yet although I had made out with girls by then. I had tried LSD and pot by then and was active in the Student Union and helped produce and distribute our High School underground Newspaper, the first or second in the state of Connecticut. We had just won the battle over using the word “fuck” in the paper saying it was appropriate to say the word in reference to the police murder of the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. My buddy Glenn and I had just come back from the Advocate Press in New Haven where they had printed the underground paper for us. We had carried hundreds of copies on the train back to Fairfield and distributed it at the high schools durring lunch. We also went to Black Panther fundraisers and sold the paper to rich people in Westport when we were doing that Mau mauing thing that Tom Wolfe talked about.
I was a participant in the Anti War Moratorium protests against the war in Vietnam. I was hanging out with a communist collective in Bridgeport and reading Mao’s little red book. I met Abbie Hoffman at a demonstration in New Haven where he spoke and I expressed an interest in the Yippies.
My family still lived in the same farm where I had been born and we had about 20 horses of our own and a dozen boarders at the time. We had the last horse farm in my home town, Fairfield, Connecticut where suburbia had taken over. On weekends I was the trail boss, taking kids out on horse back rides. Half the time I was tripping. Luckily my horse knew the way by heart. We were only a 45 minute train ride to Grand Central Station in New York City and had all the local freaks, drug dealers, studio musicians, lesbians, gays, mafia people, the rejects who could not get into the hunt club kept their horses at our place.
November 1977 I was living in Boulder, Colorado. I had just left a spiritual commune The Emissaries of Divine Light and was working in a local French restaurant where I was a saucier in training and a dishwasher. I was still going to meetings at the spiritual commune but I was mostly at loose ends after finishing the training program of the group. I had worked at the groups landscaping business before I left for the training program in the spring of that year. Now I was a graduated minister for the group and they wanted me to go to South Africa or someplace else but I wanted to go back to Boulder. That was considered to be rebellious by the group and they showed their disapproval by not offering me a position.
It was about that time that I had discovered snorting cocaine. It was popular as a tip at the restaurant, customers would send a plate with lines on it back to the kitchen and we would all indulge. Punk rock was begining to be the thing and it was about that time that my buddy Peter and I would drive around Boulder in his VW Bug listening to the Sex Pistols and talk about how screwed up the spiritual scene was with all the power trips on the part of the leadership that ruined it for people like us. I was looking for the next thing and we both felt that punk might be it. We discussed going to England to check it out or back to New York to see what the CBGB scene was all about. I had just been in the Catskills for the spiritual program. I was also wondering about this Anarchy the Sex Pistols talked about. I had met a couple of Anarchists the year before when I had seen them throw rotten tomatoes at Gus Hall who I had gone to see speak. He was running for president on the Communist Party Ticket. I ran after then asking them why they had done what they did. I mean Gus was boring but he wasn’t the enemy at least not in my mind. President Ford and Nixon, they were the bad guys. They ran down the Anarchist position, against Stalinism, which at the time I thought was a little sketchy but most Marxists by then were not into Stalin, we were in to Mao. Now I was wondering if they were involved with this new punk thing.
I was planning on going back to school at the University of Colorado in Boulder and thinking about becoming a journalist but my typing skills needed honing. I was in between things and pissed off at the world. I was writing poetry, going to NAROPA poetry events and licking my wounds after my girlfriend left me for my best friend. Ouch!
Now I am working with computers every day. I am writing this blog on the internet waiting for another girlfriend to come back from the East Coast. The strongest drug I take now is my blood pressure medication and a glass of wine once in a while is my big high. I am working on a book that I have been trying to write for years and am still not able to write more than a few pages a week. I went to an anti Nazi demonstration last weekend and I donate money to the radical left organizations that I trust. I consider myself to be some kind of a green democratic socialist but no longer an anarchist. I am in favor of government control of basic industries and services and a market economy for the limited areas where a market still makes sense like consumer luxury goods.
Forty years ago I never would have thought I would be a working class number cruncher. I didn’t even think I would still be alive. Forty years ago I thought I would have died in some revolutionary struggle or would be a commissar in a peoples republic writing my memoirs.