We are proud to host Obscura Day this April 9, a “day of expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in your hometown.”  You can get your free tickets for a tour of our work-in-progress from their site, which describes the tour as such:

Come be one of the very first to rediscover the room where the Internet was born. Almost forgotten in history and used for years as an unremarkable classroom at UCLA, it will reopen as a museum this July. Get there first and stand in the very spot that the first modem sent the first message ever, and see photos and documents from those first days of the Internet that have been lost to obscurity for decades.

Brad Fidler, director of the upcoming Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site and Archive (known colloquially by its room number, 3420 Boelter Hall), will introduce the history of this revolutionary site and the stories of the people who gave this room its significance. What was the first illegal use of the Internet? Why did everything always crash? Why did the graduate students give everything dirty acronyms, and draw horns on a machine called the Interface Message Processor, or, the (perhaps evil) IMP?

Leonard Kleinrock, the man who is credited with doing the math and running the simulations that made the early Internet possible – and still runs it today – will be on hand to answer questions and tell everyone the story about exactly what it was like to send the first message ever.

Once again, get your free tickets here.