The internet is celebrating another birthday – it is the 40th year since the infant internet first spoke.

University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969. On October 29, 1969 Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to "talk" to one at a research institute. He wanted to get computers to exchange data by breaking digitised information into packets fired between on-demand with no wasting of time. Engineers began typing "LOG" to log into the distant computer, which crashed after getting the "O."

"So, the first message was 'Lo' as in 'Lo and behold'," Kleinrock recounted. "We couldn't have a better, more succinct first message."

This is probably the best spin on the Internet breaking that we have ever heard. Kleinrock's team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on the ARPANET because funding came from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established in 1958. However this is the second date which is touted as the beginning of the Internet.

Others insist that the dawn of the Internet age actually was September 12 1969 when a team of boffins at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet.

We expect that future generations will fight wars over this in the same way that people fight over whether or not December 25 really was Jesus's birthday.