World Trade Center Steel Returns Home!

NEW YORK CITY—Steel made from the twisted girders of the collapsed World Trade Center Towers returned home Nov. 2 in the shape of a brand new Navy ship!

The USS New York proudly yet solemnly entered New York Harbor in the morning and pulled up beside Ground Zero. The ship, which has a bow made with 71/2 tons of steel salvaged from the site, gave a 21-gun salute to honor those lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A police helicopter escort and fire boats shooting red, white and blue jets of water high into the air welcomed the ship to the city. New York firefighters and spectators came to witness the salute.

The amphibious transport dock ship, built in Louisiana, is more than two football fields long. It carries a crew of 360 sailors (about 20 percent of them are actually from New York) and can deliver up to 700 Marines ashore by helicopter and amphibious assault boats. The ship weighs a whopping 22,676 tons!

Named after New York City, the USS New York is in the Big Apple to be commissioned (put into official service with the Navy) Nov. 7. The ship’s motto—“Strength forged through sacrifice. Never forget”—also honors those who died in the terrorist attacks.

While docked at Pier 88 for the week, the USS New York rolled out its welcome mat so the public could tour this state-of-the-art warship. Special tours are set aside for surviving family members of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The ship’s commander, Curtis Jones, calls it a fantastic experience and says it truly felt like the ship was coming home.

Internet Is Born 40 Years Ago!

Just two simple letters started something spectacular in the world of computers, and it happened 40 years ago.

Ten years before the first issue of Bear Essential News, computer wizards took a seemingly small step in what turned out to be the biggest breakthrough for computers!

Whether you’re visiting your favorite Web site, playing games online or researching a last-minute report, it’s all possible because of the Internet.

Working with the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a team of computer pioneers set out to create a network that would enable computers to “talk” with each other through existing phone lines.

This original geek squad included Len Kleinrock and Charley Kline at UCLA, and Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, 300 miles away.

Their idea was to break a computer message or data into small chunks, which they called packets. Those packets would be transmitted through phone lines to another computer. Once all the packets arrived, they would be reassembled into the original message. Kleinrock explains that it’s like breaking down a letter onto a bunch of postcards and mailing them out. It doesn’t matter how the individual postcards get there—they can take different routes—as long as they arrive and can be pieced back together.

To help send and receive packets of data, each computer needed to go through a special machine called an Interface Message Processor (IMP), which looks like a tall cabinet with fancy lights and switches on the front. Today’s computers use much smaller routers and modems to communicate.

Late at night on Oct. 29, 1969, Kline started to send the command “login” from his computer at UCLA to Duvall’s computer at the Stanford Research Institute. But only the letters “l” and “o” were received before Duvall’s system got a computer bug and crashed! An hour later, the two got the command to go through.

Initially, four computers with four IMPS made up the first network, which was called ARPANET. Eventually, this ridiculously primitive system evolved into today’s Internet, which seems amazingly powerful and advanced until a bug knocks out your connection!