Birth of computer communication. A team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) sends the first computer message to a team at the Stanford Research Institute. This brings about the ARPAnet, a project funded by the Advance Research Projects Agency(ARPA) and the precursor to today's internet. The ARPAnet was intended as a network to allow researchers at selected centers to link up with each other's computers. The first computers on the ARPAnet were UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, and the University of Utah, in that order.