On Oct. 20, 1969, the Interface Message Processor, which worked as the world's first packet-switching router, communicated with a computer at UCLA, seven weeks after they were first connected.

On that October day, the UCLA computer managed to send exactly two characters across the connection to a second computer at Stanford before the entire system crashed under the strain. The two successfully transmitted characters were the letters L and O ; which some have gleefully dubbed the first Netspeak contraction for "hello."

The UCLA team actually intended to spell out the word LOG, which the Stanford system would recognize and then complete as the command LOGIN. (A second attempt made later that day was more successful.)