Walter Isaacson Quote
Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto. He typed in L. The guy at SRI told him that it had been received. Then he typed in O. That, too, was confirmed. When he typed in G, the system hit a memory snag because of an auto-complete feature and crashed. Nevertheless, the first message had been sent across the ARPANET, and if it wasn’t as eloquent as The Eagle has landed or What has God wrought, it was suitable in its understated way: Lo. As in Lo and behold. In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, 22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.101
Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto. He typed in L. The guy at SRI told him that it had been received. Then he typed in O. That, too, was confirmed. When he typed in G, the system hit a memory snag because of an auto-complete feature and crashed. Nevertheless, the first message had been sent across the ARPANET, and if it wasn’t as eloquent as The Eagle has landed or What has God wrought, it was suitable in its understated way: Lo. As in Lo and behold. In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, 22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.101
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About Walter Isaacson
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.