On the night of 29 October 1969, 21-year-old student Charley Kline sat hunched over a computer screen in a windowless room with pistachio-coloured walls at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As his computer science supervisor Leonard Kleinrock looked on, Kline carefully typed out a single word. Moments later, on a screen some 350 miles (560km) away at Stanford University, Kline"s message popped up: "Lo" it read.