Wow. It’s not often the Technology Podcast gets to celebrate the very reason, figuratively and literally, for its existence. But this week, the Internet celebrated its 40th anniversary/birthday/whatever you want to call it. That’s UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock, with the Interface Message Processor. Forty years ago this week, Kleinrock and his team sent the first message between two computers. One of the computers was at UCLA, and the other was up at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). That message was supposed to be “L-O-G-I-N.” Prophetically, maybe poetically, only the “L” and “O” got through before the Net experienced its first system crash. Anyone know how to say “Fail Whale” in 1969-speak? Anyway — to celebrate, UCLA threw a symposium-ish bash. You can read more about that here. Our intrepid left coast correspondent, Cyrus Farivar, happened to be down in Los Angeles for the festivities. He sent us interviews with Kleinrock and Charles Kline (who typed that fateful “L-O” message). He also sent along an extended interview with Chinese blogger and Internet activist Isaac Mao. All in all, the three interviews provide a fascinating glimpse into what the Net was, what it is, and what it could be someday. And speaking of where the Net is headed. Word came today from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is to allow scripts besides the Latin script in domain names. These so-called Internationalized Domain Names will now be allowed to include Arabic, Chinese, Russian and many other scripts. As always, explaining the domain name set-up is a bit tricky, so here’s a video to help you:

I know many of you will be asking for some of the source material for the opening audio montage. So, below, please find two incredibly enlightening videos. This stuff is gold, people, pure gold. We’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.