Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles are celebrating the anniversary of the first message sent over what would eventually become the internet.

In the 1960s, computer scientists at American universities and in the U.S. Department of Defence devised a plan for a network of computers that could all communicate with each other.

After the hardware was put in place, researchers at UCLA attempted on Oct. 29, 1969, to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

Leonard Kleinrock

In an interview on CBC Newsworld, Prof. Leonard Kleinrock admitted researchers weren't exactly prepared for the history-making moment.

"[The message] wasn't anything like 'What hath God wrought?' or 'Come here, Watson. I want you,' or 'a giant leap for mankind.' We weren't that smart," he said, referring to the first messages over telegraph, over telephone and from the surface of the moon.

In order to log in to the two-computer network, which was then called ARPANET, programmers at UCLA were to type in "log," and Stanford would reply "in."

The UCLA programmers only got as far as "lo" before the Stanford machine crashed.

But Kleinrock put a tongue-in-cheek positive spin on the less-than-momentous message.

"The first message on the internet was 'Lo!' What better prophetic message could you ask for?" he said.

The two computers wouldn't successfully link up until Nov. 21, 1969, but those two letters are considered the first message transmitted over the fledgling network.

ARPANET would grow to include more computers at universities and military bases across the U.S., before expanding into today's internet, which connects millions of computers worldwide.

Kleinrock said he predicted in 1969 that the small network would eventually expand across the globe, making a vast amount of information accessible at any time from anywhere in the world.

"The part I missed... was that my 97-year-old mother would be on the internet today," he said.