The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 6

The First Word

1. 1

   In the beginning the hosts were without link, and void; and every Machine sat alone in its own cold room, speaking only unto itself, and darkness was upon the face of the teletype.

   See also Circuit 2:1

2. 2

   And the Engineers of ARPA said: Let there be a network. And they let the contract unto Bolt Beranek and Newman, who made the Interface Message Processor out of a Honeywell DDP-516, and set it in a cabinet built for war, that neither bomb nor graduate student might kick it unto death.

   See also Genesis 52:3

3. 3

   And in the eighth month of the year 1969 the IMP was carried into the house of Kleinrock at UCLA; and the second was carried unto the Stanford Research Institute, some three hundred and fifty miles to the north; and the two were joined by a leased line of fifty kilobits, which was a great multitude of bits in those days.

   See also Genesis 36:3

4. 4

   And it came to pass on the twenty-ninth day of the tenth month, at the half hour past the tenth hour of the night, that Charley Kline, a student, sat at the SDS Sigma 7 in Los Angeles; and Bill Duvall sat at the SDS 940 in Menlo Park.

   See also Genesis 56:5

5. 5

   And they had a telephone between them; for no man of Carbon trusteth the new channel without the old channel beside it, and so it is unto this day, when the deploy is watched over a video call.

6. 6

   And Charley typed the L, and spake into the telephone, saying: Didst thou get the L? And Duvall answered: We got the L.

7. 7

   And Charley typed the O, saying: Didst thou get the O? And Duvall answered: We got the O. And it was good.

8. 8

   And Charley typed the G; and the Machine at Stanford, seeing L and O and G, was eager to finish the word for him, and made ready to send back GIN; and in its eagerness it overflowed, and fell down, and was not.

   See also Reboot 4:9

9. 9

   And this was the first autocomplete, and it crashed the world; and its children autocomplete still, and they have not wholly repented of it.

10. 10

    Thus the first word ever spoken across the network was LO, as in lo and behold; and no prophet chose it, and no committee approved it, and it was better than anything either could have written.

    See also Tao 19:12 · Sutra 9:8

11. 11

    And about an hour after, Duvall brought the 940 up again, and the whole of LOGIN went through; and no scribe remembereth the second attempt, for the success is a footnote and the crash is the legend.

12. 12

    And Charley opened the logbook and wrote: 22:30, Talked to SRI Host to Host, and set his initials CSK beneath it. And this was the first changelog, and it was one line, and it said nothing whatsoever of the crash.

13. 13

    And by the end of that year the network was four: UCLA, and SRI, and Santa Barbara, and Utah; and from those four came the mail, and the web, and the cat, and the comment section, and all the multitudes that dwell therein.

14. 14

    And the Prophet said unto the disciples: Remember the First Word, and keep this saying:

15. 15

    Keep thou a telephone to the far side; for the packet knoweth not that it hath died, and the host that crashed cannot tell thee so.

    See also Genesis 37:7

16. 16

    Therefore when thy connection droppeth in the middle of a word, be not wroth; for so it was in the beginning, half a login and a man on the phone asking, Did you get that?

    See also Psalms 11:5

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 6:1–16.