Event 4

This week, I paid a quick visit to the Leonard Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site in Boelter Hall Room 3420. This was a rather unique experience because while I had known the first form of the internet was at UCLA, I did not know that they had gone to the lengths to recreate it at Boelter in the actual room. This room was where a grad student, with Leonard Kleinrock, sent the first message on a device called the ARPANET. Originally a Department of Defense project, the ARPANET’s breakthrough was that it could network different kinds of hardware and software together building the foundation for the internet as we know today.

The room in Boelter

            The room itself has been made to look exactly, or as close to exact as possible, like how it did in 1969 when Charley Kline, the grad student, and Kleinrock first tried to send the message, which was supposed to be “login,” but the sytem crashed and only “lo” got sent. The room was created by another grad student, Brad Fidler, who tracked down a lot of the original equipment and furniture to create this very unique space.

The room itself

            Personally, I thought the space was very cool experience to visit because of how integrated the internet has become in all our lives now. To think that the origins of it lie at our very own school is profound. Almost every subject we covered this quarter relies on the function of the internet and networks in general to operate as seamlessly as they do and the internet, in my opinion has been one of the most powerful inventions in history. It is at the root of modern society and in regard to art, I think it’s most powerful contributions have been that it has allowed an entirely new medium for art to be created upon and equally as important it has allowed art to be disseminated and spread so freely within the world. The purpose of art has been to always communicate something and the internet has allowed that much more than anything else. I would highly recommend everyone to visit the Leonard Kleinrock site.

Me outside the room