The first step in creating computer networks took place on September 2, 1969, when UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, 65, the man largely credited as being the "Father of the Internet" and his team succeeded in hooking up their computer to a refrigerator-sized switch, or router, known as an Interphase Message Processor. Was this the birthday of the Internet?

Some people want the Internet's birthday to be October 20, 1969, the first day one computer actually transmitted data to another computer. Although during that test transmission, the fledgling network of two computers, one at Stanford and one at UCLA, crashed during the test.

Kleinrock himself is not very sure. "You could say that the Internet came to life on either of those dates," he said. "No pictures, no nothing."

Funded by the U.S. government's Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the fledgling network, later to be known as the Internet was intended as a network to give researchers at selected centers the ability to use one another's computers.

"At that time, in the 1960s, ARPA was funding all kinds of research...But with everyone wanting their computers to be unique to their own needs, the cost was skyrocketing, so ARPA conceived of creating a network, so that if you had something in your computer that I wanted I would simply log on to your machine, thereby dramatically reducing the costs, hence the word Arpanet," Kleinrock explained.

Here's the trivia question. What message were they scientists attempting to transmit between the two computers on October 20, 1969, and what portion of the message was successfully transmitted? The answers are at the bottom of the page.

Dave Murphy is founder and membership director of ITrain, the International Association of Information Technology Trainers. ITrain is the global professional society for IT trainers.
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