1973

One night in September 1973 Leonard Kleinrock unpacked his suitcase. He had just been at a conference in Brighton, Great Britain about data technology and communication and came back to Los Angeles. Something was missing though. Did he forget something? It was his razor. He must have forgotten his razor in the bathroom of the Sussex university guest house. It was not a very valuable razor, but he wanted it back. Kleinrock flew back one day earlier to the United States than the rest of the participants. As he was missing his razor, an idea came to his mind. He could ask someone who still was at the conference to look for his appliance and to take it along. There used to be a useful program on the network called „resource-sharing executive“ or RSEXEC in short.

This software was able to find a person on the network, assumed that he was logged in. But what kind of madman would be logged in at 3 am? Kleinrock went to his terminal and typed in “where Roberts“, and in fact, Roberts was still in Brighton and online. In order to contact him Kleinrock used a program called TALK, which split up the monitor into two halves. On one side, Kleinrock could write and on the other side he could read his colleagues’ replies. Just one day later Kleinrock had back his razor. Due to this “razor rescue” Kleinrock contributed much to the steadily growing usage of personal messages and e-mails along the network.