Hello SIGCIS, Longtime members may remember our entanglement (https://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai) a decade ago with one Shiva Ayyadurai, self-proclaimed "inventor of email," former quasi-husband of Fran Drescher, onetime wellness entrepreneur, and more recently a serially failed candidate for office in Massachusetts and expert consultant on election procedures to groups trying to overturn the 2020 election. If you don't remember him then count yourself lucky. Do not on any account visit his Wikipedia page, look at this article https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-con vince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/, and then go down a rabbit hole that will consume the rest of your day. Todays message turns out to be about something entirely different even though it started out with what seemed to be another aspiring inventor of email. According to some San Antonio newspaper articles from 2009 and 2010 that were recently brought to my attention https://www.mysanantonio.com/community/northwest/news/article/Innovator-desc ribes-first-Internet-e-mail-792556.php and https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Pioneer-recalls-first-e-mail-8 45391.php, Internet email was invented on Oct 1, 1969 by Ben Barker of BBN. Here's a taste: "One distinctive artifact remains from the first Internet e-mail message of 1969: Xolox and Misan decided to use the @ symbol to locate each other's networks. It's a symbol that's part of every Internet e-mail today." This is of course particularly odd because both Internet email and the @ sign are conventionally attributed to another BBN employee in 1971: Ray Tomlinson. So what's going on here? Well, Ben Barker really was a member of the BBN ARPANET team. He's mentioned in a similar context a 2020 Harvard Magazine article by Harry Lewis (an insider account of the emergence of computer science at Harvard) https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born: While working for BBN during his Harvard graduate studies, Barker installed the first IMP at UCLA in September 1969. Thrope, employed full time at BBN after finishing his undergraduate degree, installed the second IMP a month later at SRI (originally the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park). On October 6 Barker sent the first message to Thrope across the network, which at that point consisted of nothing but those two IMPs. From two nodes the internet has grown to tens of billions of computers. Barker does not remember what his message said. The fact that it arrived was miracle enough. At this point my head was spinning, given the conventional Oct 29 date for the first APRANET communication. How could Barker claim to have email running before packets were being exchanged? But notice that here that Lewis's claim is that Barker sent a "message across the network" which makes somewhat more sense, and is an idea could have been garbled by a reporter into "sent an Internet email." The newspaper articles are very confused - for example saying that email in 1970 was routinely possible between computers on the same network, whereas the truth is it was possible only between users on the same computer. Thus I'm inclined to blame the San Antonio reporter for all the silliness about @ signs and emails and assume that what Barker was actually intending to take credit for was sending the first data between two ARPANET nodes, which seems to be what Lewis is describing. That's a much more interesting claim. Were the first ARPANET messages exchanged on Oct 6, 1969 by Barker and Thorpe? Not according to conventional history. I mean, all you have to do it to check Wikipedia. Len Kleinrock has been boasting for decades that the first ARPANET packet was sent from UCLA to SRI on 29 October, 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET The first successful host to host connection on the ARPANET was made between Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and UCLA, by SRI programmer Bill Duvall and UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969).[57] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-57> Kline connected from UCLA's SDS Sigma 7 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_7> Host computer (in Boelter Hall room 3420) to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_940> Host computer. Kline typed the command "login," but initially the SDS 940 crashed after he typed two characters. About an hour later, after Duvall adjusted parameters on the machine, Kline tried again and successfully logged in. Hence, the first two characters successfully transmitted over the ARPANET were "lo".[58] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-58> [59] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-59> [60] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-60> The first permanent ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By 5 December 1969, the initial four-node network was established. It seems unlikely that Wikipedia, historians, and the IEEE historic milestone committee (https://ethw.org/Milestones:Birthplace_of_the_Internet,_1969) are all wrong about the Oct 29 date. (Though like many other historians I have some reservations about the whole "UCLA as birthplace the Internet" narrative: BBN's role was far more significant than any of the initial user sites. And if the ARPANET was born when two hosts communicated, how can only one of them be the first node? Aren't they jointly first?) Looking closer though, it may well be that what Lewis was attributing to Barker in the Harvard magazine report something different from the more commonly celebrated milestone of a "host to host connection." If Barker got the UCLA and SRI IMPS to send characters back and forth in early Oct, 1969 it could quite plausibly have taken several weeks for Duvall and Kline to get the timesharing "host" computers in each place to exchange data packets with each other via the IMPs. I can't find any mention of this two stage process in the most obvious places, such as Janet Abbate's book _Inventing the Internet_, but logically speaking the two IMPs must have been talking to each other before the hosts could talk through them, and the obvious way to verify this would have been to manually type a message from one IMP to the other. This would fit with Barker's claim to have "sent a message" to his BBN colleague who was minding the IMP on the other end. BBN/Raytheon seemed to offer a claim like that in this press release, though with a slightly different date: https://www.raytheon.com/sites/default/files/rtnwcm/groups/gallery/documents /digitalasset/rtn_224614.pdf Barker traveled with the IMP to make sure the airline's cargo crew treated it with the respect it deserved and Truett Thach, a technician in BBN's Los Angeles office, met Barker and the IMP as they deplaned. When the IMP got to UCLA, Barker and Thach attached the cables and powered it up. Instantly, the machine picked up just where it had left off in Cambridge. Barker phoned Heart to tell him the good news and that he would be coming home in the morning. Heart asked Barker to hang around for a few days to see if it crashed. It didn't. On October 1, 1969, the second IMP arrived at SRI and the first characters were transmitted over the new network. The ARPANET was born. IMPs number three and four were installed at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah with little fanfare. IMP installations were beginning to seem routine. If my reading is correct and if Barker remembered the date and details right (a big if - some documentation would be nice) then whether he sent the first APANET message is almost a philosophical question: did the network come into being when two host computers first communicated over an ARPANET link, or earlier when two IMPs began to push characters back and forth over a leased line. Most people would say the former, but it's not unreasonable for Barker to want to highlight the latter. The answer may also vary depending on perspective, specifically whether you were an IMP hardware guy, like Barker, or a network user like Kleinrock. Every time a question came up that required deep ARPANET knowledge I used to email Dave Walden, who was one of the original BBN team and had a deep interest in computer history. He died recently, and I am missing him greatly. So I am throwing this question to SIGCIS instead: can anyone confirm that IMP to IMP communication took place between SRI and UCLA several weeks prior to the better known milestone of host to host communication? Or otherwise explain what is going on here? Best wishes, Tom