Los Angeles  - The man who sent the first-ever internet message in 1969 recalled the event Thursday at a conference celebrating the 40th birthday of the revolutionary communications network.

"It's the 40th year since the infant internet first spoke," University of California at Los Angeles Professor Leonard Kleinrock told a conference of entrepreneurs, computer scientists and technology pundits.

"The internet is a democratizing element; everyone has an equivalent voice. There is no way back at this point. We can't turn it off. The internet age is here."

Kleinrock developed the technology of packet switching, which allowed data to split up and Routed to various points across the internet. He first implemented the technology on October 29, 1969, when he used the first internet router to establish communications from a mainframe computer at UCLA to another mainframe at the Stanford Research Institute in the San Francisco Bay area.

However, the first message caused the system to crash after only two letters were transmitted, with the result that it read simply "lo" instead of "login." Kleinrock and technician Charlie Kline quickly repaired the connection and sent a full message a few minutes later, he recalled.

Kleinrock said that he regretted not building stronger identification protocols into the internet to help prevent the avalanche of spam, viruses and malicious software that have blighted the growth of the global network.

"The net is penetrating every aspect of our lives," Kleinrock said to a room of about 200 people and more watching online.

"As a teenager, the internet is behaving badly. The dark side has emerged. The question is, when it grows into a young adult will it get over this period of misbehaving?" (dpa)