Forks in the Digital Road: Key Decisions in the History of the Internet - Paperbackby Scott J. Shackelford (Author), Scott O. Bradner (Author) Fifty years ago, a UCLA computer science professor and his student sent the first electronic message over a network called ARPANET, a predecessor to the Internet. The intended message, the word "login", was truncated in a computer crash to "lo." Digital infrastructure has made significant advances since then, but key decision points in the history of the Internet continue to reverberate today