Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, currently a professor of computer science at UCLA, and chairman of the department from 1991-1995, as well as CEO of TTI Vanguard and chairman of Nomadix, joins Halley to recount his early involvement in the ARPANET and his work with other pioneers to build out the Internet.

Dr. Kleinrock explains the basic principles of packet switching, which he published early in the 1960's and which is the technology underpinning the Internet. His computer at UCLA was the first node on the Internet and on October 29, 1969 he directed the transmission of the first message to pass over the 'Net.

Halley asks Len to recall the way it felt to really be there at historic points along the way -- the first message (only the "L-O" of the word "L-O-G-I-N" travelled from UCLA to SRI before the first 'Net crash), the addition of more nodes past the first four, the launching of a killer app called email, the move from NCP to TCP/IP, the NSFNET backbone, the appearance of the browser and HTML, of the URL convention, as well as the debate over whether the Internet should be commercialized in the early 1990s since it had only been an academic resource until then.

Len knew all the players and tells great anecdotes about working with colleagues like Larry Roberts, Ray Tomlinson, J.C.R. Licklider, Jon Postel and Vint Cerf among many others.

They finish with Len's thoughts on the future of the Internet and an analysis of whether the 'Net has lived up to the early founders' expectations to create an always-on, ubiquitious, always-accessible, hardware-agnostic, invisible communications network.

This program is part of the Memory Lane series featuring Halley Suitt.