On September 11, 1940, decades before packet switching or modern cloud infrastructure, mathematician George Stibitz quietly inaugurated the era of remote computing. Demonstrating his work before the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Stibitz typed complex equations into a standard teletype terminal. Instead of processing the data locally, the terminal transmitted signals over standard telegraph lines to Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan, where Stibitz’s electromechanical Complex Number Computer performed the calculations and wired back the answers in seconds. By severing the user interface from the physical mainframe across hundreds of miles, Stibitz demonstrated the foundational mechanics of client-server architecture. Long before ARPANET, this landmark experiment proved that computation was an accessible, networkable utility rather than a localized monolith, establishing the technological lineage for modern distributed systems.