Before his death, Nikola Tesla was reportedly working on what the press called a "Death Ray." It was a weapon so powerful it could obliterate military targets from hundreds of miles away, but did it actually exist?
On October 29, 1969, Stanford programmer Bill Duvall sent a single-word message—"login"—to UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, 350 miles away. Transmitted between two computers that each filled an entire room, this message marked the first communication between networked computers and is widely regarded as the birth of the internet.