Today is Easter Sunday. Above, part of “The Ascension of Christ” by Salvador Dalí (1958. Oil on canvas. Pérez Simón Collection).

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“The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” aired on British television on this date in 1978. A parody of the history of The Beatles created by Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Neil Innes (Bonzo Dog Band), the film performed better in the ratings than it had a week earlier on American television, where it finished last for the night. Innes composed the songs with an intention to make them sound more Beatles-esque than Beatles … um, -ish … and was sued for copyright infringement by representatives of The Beatles. The film (below the fold):
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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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