This message to all ARPANET users announces the availability on ARPANET of the Coral 66 compiler provided by the GEC 4080 computer at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, Malvern, England. Coral 66 is the standard real-time high level language adopted by the Ministry of Defence.—the first email sent by a head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, on March 26, 1976

Queen Elizabeth II was visiting the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, a telecommunications research center in Malvern, England, to officially christen, like a new ship, the ARPANET connection that was about to be switched on. ARPANET stood for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, and it is what eventually became our Internet. A technician named Peter Kirstein, later inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame but not for this moment in history, composed the first royal email and stationed the Queen at the workstation seen in the photo above. All she had to do was hit a few keys and there it was: the first email sent by a head of state, 40 years ago today.
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Today is Greek Independence Day, the date that is associated with the start in 1821 of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire.

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“Talking in our beds for a week …” Newlyweds John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged their first “Bed-In for Peace” at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel starting on this date in 1969. The press was invited to visit the two artists from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. each day in the Presidential Suite (room 702) in the hotel, where they found John and Yoko dressed in white pajamas, sitting in bed and discussing peace under hair-drawn signs that read “Hair Peace” and “Bed Peace.” In May, they staged a sequel in Montreal, in which the song “Give Peace a Chance” was recorded by those present. Some history about “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (below the fold):
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Forty-five years ago today, the little boy on the right met the little girl on the left. He was a big brother all of a sudden, or so it seemed. He hated it at first, but then he came to love being a big brother and to love his sister even more than that.

(Truth be told, she often seems to be the more mature sibling—even in the photo above—and she often seems to know what to do sooner and better about most of life’s many things than her big brother does, but this is mainly because big brother kept finding himself distracted by odd byways and paths through life, and he did his best to make them look unattractive for her, so she would not follow. That is what he tells himself, anyway.)

Happy birthday, Michelle! I love you.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 97 today. He is still writing, creating art, and giving cantankerous interviews. His poem, “Dog” (below the fold):
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