On October 29, 1969, UCLA grad student Charley Kline sat in a room in Boelter Hall and typed the first message on the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet (he wrote “lo”–before he could get to the “g” in “login” the system crashed). The ARPANET was a defense department project centered on the first router, the Interface Message Processor. The IMP was built by BBN (now a subsidiary of Raytheon) and based on theoretical work done by UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock (he was the other person in the room when Kline typed “lo”). It cost about $100,000. The ARPANET's big breakthrough was
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