The first is the birthday of Asterix, a favorite comic book character that often reminds me of childhood trips to the library. Will they have a new one today?

It’s been 50 years … something I only found by way of the Google Doodle above on Google.ca this morning. Here’s an excerpt from a related article:

This month marks the 50th birthday of France’s most popular comic book. Back in October 1959, writer René Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo had their first comic strip published in the magazine Pilote. The comic featured Asterix and Obelix, two inseparable and delightfully complementary characters from a small village in Brittany renowned for “sticking it to the man” by resisting Caesar’s colonial ambitions. Asterix and Obelix’s adventures did suffer from some ups and down along the way, most notably after Goscinny’s death in 1977, but their popularity never did fade: the comic books sold more than 325m copies worldwide and have been translated into 107 languages.
Jessica Reed at guardian.co.uk

The second, 40 years ago, is the “first message ever sent over the ARPANET” as described in a Wikipedia article. Here is an excerpt (follow the link below to read the complete article):

The first message ever sent over the ARPANET (sent over the first host-to-host connection) occurred at 10:30 PM on October 29, 1969. It was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline and supervised by UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock. The message was sent from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The message itself was simply the word “login.” The “l” and the “o” transmitted without problem but then the system crashed. Hence, the first message on the ARPANET was “lo”. They were able to do the full login about an hour later.
Wikipedia

As much as I would expect the latter to be more important to Google, it would seem the former. Which is more important to you?

© 2009, Edward Caissie. All rights reserved.