We Built an Unkillable Network, Then Gave Governments the Kill Switch

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On October 29, 1969, a graduate student at UCLA named Charley Kline sent the first message over ARPANET. He was trying to type 'LOGIN' to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, 350 miles away. The system crashed after the first two letters. The first message ever sent over what would become the internet was 'LO.'

ARPANET was built by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same DARPA that later funded Shakey the Robot and the Grand Challenge that led to self-driving cars. The network's design was driven by a specific fear: nuclear war. If the Soviet Union destroyed a city, the communications network needed to keep working. The solution was decentralization. No central hub. No single point of failure. Messages would find their own routes through the network, flowing around damage like water around a rock.

This architecture, packet switching, distributed routing, no central control, became the foundation of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web in 1989 with the same philosophy: decentralized, open, no gatekeepers. The internet's founding myth is that it's unkillable.

“ARPANET was designed to survive nuclear war. It cannot survive a government bureaucrat with a phone. The architecture is resilient. The politics are not.”