Internet

Arpanet

The Internet has its roots in the ARPANET, a small network of unwieldy mainframe computers that, beginning on October 29, 1969, connected two computers—one at the University of California–Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute in San Francisco, hundreds of miles away. Other mainframe computers, or “nodes,” were added later at various universities, corporations, and U.S. government installations, so that by 1972 there were some 31 nodes, or host computers, connected to the ARPANET.

The ARPANET was funded by the U.S. government's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a small agency under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Defense that was formed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the wake of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the first telecommunications satellite. The agency was given wide latitude, and the funding to concentrate on whatever projects it wanted. By the early 1960s, under the guidance of the agency's visionary director J. C. R. Licklider, ARPA had changed focus from outer space to unmasking the potential of computer technology as an aid in human problem-solving, even on the grandest of scales. As part of his vision, Licklider foresaw what he called an “intergalactic network” of computers that could communicate and share information all over the planet.

Subsequent ARPA directors, most importantly Robert Taylor, picked up on Licklider's ideals. With one 20-minute conversation, Taylor procured $1 million from his supervisors to build and launch the first long-distance, computerized network to connect ARPA with the various research agencies that it was funding. In 1966, Taylor recruited Larry Roberts away from Lincoln Laboratories, where he had been working on computer graphics, to head up the team that would design, build, and implement the ARPANET. Roberts in turn put the project up for competitive bids, and selected a small Cambridge, Massachusetts, consulting firm, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), to bring the ARPANET project to fruition.

The ARPANET was built on an innovation that would also serve as the basis for the wider Internet. In 1961, an engineer named Paul Baran had devised a system for the transmission of information through phone lines that involved breaking messages up into “blocks”; British researcher Donald Watts Davies independently came up with an almost identical breakthrough, but he referred to divided message bits as “packets,” the name that would stick. Baran's idea was built on the notion that, in order to create a computerized system that would survive a nuclear [Page 248]attack, decentralization was needed. He devised a way to split up information so that it would flow over the phone lines according to the route the served as the shortest and least congested path. A computer on the other end would reassemble the blocks, and present the message to the receiver in a way that could be properly read.

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