Nobody, with the exception of its designers, understood what the network of computers actually did — and the dense, technological language was not much help either. When Senator Ted Kennedy learned the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a government body charged with seeking out ways to protect American military infrastructure in case of nuclear attack, contracted a company from his home state to build an “interface message processor,” he sent the company a congratulatory message, praising them for their “interfaith message processor.” If ARPA had a belief in a higher power, it was that of a computer.

On this day, April 7, in 1969, the first contract to build out the network, then called ARPANET, was awarded to Bolt, Beranek and Newman. On that same day, Steve Crocker, a professor at UCLA and one of the ARPANET developers issued the standard procedure “request for comments” for his document on host software for the Internet.

Together, the two processes laid the foundation of the modern Internet. Requests for comments would be issued in the thousands during the process, and are still in use today. By September of that year, an experimental host-to-host connection was set up and ready for testing. Letters spelling out LOGIN appeared on the screen indicating the connection process. The first login attempt crashed after the G – but the second one was successful.