LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - It started out 30 years ago as a rocky, unpaved road full of potholes and ended up as the information superhighway known as the Internet.

The Internet celebrates its 30th birthday Thursday with a special conference of its proponents at the University of California at Los Angeles, especially those pioneers who can remember its first days, when it was known as the ARPAnet and users logged in rather than logged on.

While ``WWW'' now stands for World Wide Web, during those infant days the acronym might better have meant wild, wacky and who-knows-what's-going-to-happen-next.

Indeed, the forerunner of modern e-mail went wrong the first time around when there was a system failure during the first ever attempt to link two computers, according to UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, 65, the man largely credited as being the ''Father of the Internet.''

In an interview with Reuters, Kleinrock said that on Oct. 20, 1969 a group of computer scientists at UCLA were about to make history by getting their computer to talk to another one at the Stanford Research Institute in northern California.

``We had a guy sitting at the computer console at UCLA wearing a telephone headset and a microphone, talking to another guy at Stanford. When everything was set up he was going to type the word 'log' and the Stanford computer would automatically add 'in' to complete the word 'login.'

``So our guy typed the 'L' and asked his counterpart at Stanford 'Did you get the 'L' and Stanford replied, 'Got the 'L.' Then they did the same for 'O,' and then the whole system crashed!'' Kleinrock said.

But on reflection 30 years later, he feels that the first message ever sent from one computer to another was symbolic. ''Put it into phonetics and you get (h)'ello, which is really quite appropriate,'' he said.

The vital first step in getting a computer to talk to another computer was taken on Sept. 2, 1969, when Kleinrock and his team succeeded in hooking up their computer to a refrigerator-sized switch, or router, known as an Interphase Message Processor.
``So at that time you had a computer talking to a switch for the very first time, and without that you could not have computer talking to computer,'' he said.

Although the UCLA conference honors Sept. 2 as the birthday of the Internet, some people think the date should be Oct. 20, the first time one computer had actually talked to another.

Kleinrock himself is not very sure. ``You could say that the Internet came to life on either of those dates,'' he said. Certainly, no record was made of the Sept. 2 event. ``No pictures, no nothing.''

The Internet, he said, was a child of necessity. Funded by the U.S. government's Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA), it was intended as a network to give researchers at selected centers the ability to use each other's computers.

``At that time, in the 1960s, ARPA was funding all kinds of research.... But with everyone wanting their computers to be unique to their own needs the cost was skyrocketing, so ARPA conceived of creating a network, so that if you had something in your computer that I wanted I would simply log on to your machine, thereby dramatically reducing the costs, hence the word ARPAnet,'' Kleinrock explained.

In retrospect, he does not think he and his colleagues created a monster. ``You can anticipate the computer-to-computer communications, you can't anticipate the human-to-human communications,'' Kleinrock said. ``When e-mail came on, that was the first clue that interaction between people was really the killer application.''

He added, ``You have to weigh the good against the bad. Is there something we can control? No. Pornography is a good example of that.''

Kleinrock stressed that he and his colleagues looked at creating the ARPAnet as a technological challenge, not an ethical one.

``Were we thinking about the impact and the ethics? No. Did we try to lay down some codification of how this thing should be used? No. Did we abrogate our responsibility to think about that? Yes.

``We did not think about the potential dangers,'' he said. ''We talked about bits and bytes and routers and switches. We did not talk about, 'Will little Charlie do his homework on it or will he look at pornography?'''

But Kleinrock has no regrets. ``Would I do it again? You bet.''