Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

creation of a system that could allow all computers to use a single network to interact. 3 The first message
to be sent was to be a simple one, “login.” The letter “l” was sent, then the letter “o,” and then the system
crashed. So, the first message ever sent over what would become the Internet was “lo.” An hour later,
Kline got the system up and running again, and the full word “login” was sent.
In the earliest years of the Internet, most people didn’t know it existed. The Internet was primarily a
tool for the Department of Defense to allow researchers at multiple sites across the country to work on
defense projects. It was called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (). In 1973,
the University College of London (England) and the Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) connected
to ARPANET, and the term “Internet” was born. A year later, in 1974, a commercialized version of
ARPANET called Telenet became the first Internet service provider (ISP).
The early Internet was not exactly designed for your average user, so it took quite a bit of skill and “know
how” to use the Internet and find information. Of course, while the Internet was developing, so was its
capability for allowing people to communicate and interact with one another. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson
was working on two programs that could be used over ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL. From
his lab at MIT, Tomlison sent a message from one computer to another computer sitting right next to it,
sending the message through ARPANET and creating the first electronic email. Tomlison also forever
changed our lives by introducing the “@” symbol as the separator the Internet uses when sending and
receiving messages.
In addition to email, another breakthrough in computer-mediated communication was the
development of Internet forums or , which are online discussion sites where
people can hold conversations in the form
of posted messages. Steve Walker created
an early message board for ARPANET. The
primary message list for professionals was
MsgGroup. The number one message board
that was not business related was SF-Lovers,
a science fiction list. As you can see, from the
earliest days of the Internet, people were using
the Internet as a tool to communicate and
interact with people who had similar interests.
One early realization about email and
message boards was that people relied solely
on text to interpret messages, which lacked
nonverbal cues to aid in interpretation.
On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman, a
research professor of computer science at
Carnegie Mellon, came up with an idea. You
see, at Carnegie Mellon in the early 1980s (like
most research universities at the time), they
had their own bulletin board system (BBS),
which discussed everything from campus
politics to science fiction. As Fahlman noted,
I propose that the following character
sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is
probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given
current trends. For this, use
:-(
Figure 12.3 Emoticon Email
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Interpersonal Communication