Xeni on Australian national radio about 35th anniversary of 'Net

Earlier today I was a guest on the breakfast show of Australia's ABC Radio National, along with professors Leonard Kleinrock and Alex Halavais. The occasion: an event in LA tomorrow commemorating the 35th anniversary of the internet. (Event link). Here's the list of participants.

Kleinrock is from the Computing Sciences Department at the UCLA, and is credited with having sent the first email-type message in 1969. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around how badass that is. I am planning to ask him to autograph my laptop tomorrow. Mr. Halavais is assistant professor at the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo. He studies really interesting stuff! Here's a snip from the show summary:

It's the internet's thirty-fifth birthday today. Like any baby, when it was born in 1969, the Internet looked nothing like the grown-up version of today which networks millions of computers. Back then, it linked just a handful of computers. It was the brainchild of researchers from the University of California who wanted to send data from one computer to several others at the same time.

On this day in 1969, a message we might now call an email was sent from UCLA to nearby Stanford University. The moment the 'send' button was hit, a new era of global communications began.

Link to archived radio show, with streaming sound online (in RealAudio only, sorry).

For those of you in Los Angeles tomorrow who plan to stopy by the event -- here's a tip, if you're hoping to blog-while-confabbing. Bring batteries! They'll have wifi in the house, but no electrical outlets in the room where the conference is taking place. Only 50 or 60 IPs available, too, so connectivity could be tough to access if a lot of bloggers show up. See you there!