The History of ARPA

By emhale

  • The Space Race begins

    The Space Race begins
    The Russians launch Sputnik as the first man-made satellite. America, and President Eisenhower, know that the next stage of the Cold War is technology.

  • ARPA is announced

    ARPA is announced
    President of MIT James Killian and the Secretary of Defense announce the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was meant to be "an extension of the defense-oriented military-university collaborations that began in World War II" (Isaacson 105).

  • Packet-Switching

    Packet-Switching
    Donald Davies, Paul Baran, and Leonard Kleinrock all independently come up with the concept of packet switching during the 1960s. In it, data is broken up into standard-size blocks of a message, which is then transmitted (Isaacson 111-113).

  • Licklider joins

    Licklider joins
    Joseph C. R. Licklider, who focused on the interactions between man and machine, is recruited for a new office at ARPA. He took over the Command and Control Research office and a group studying the psychological factors of military decision-making, combining both into his Information Processing Techniques Office (Isaacson 105).

  • Taylor and Roberts join

    Taylor and Roberts join
    Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts join ARPA, two complementary men that disagreed on everything, but who worked together to create what would become ARPANET. Taylor handled people with his personality while Roberts awed them with his intellect (Isaacson 106).

  • ARPANET Plan

    ARPANET Plan
    Taylor held a meeting at the University of Michigan, where he and Roberts presented a plan for a time-sharing network across phone lines. Many of the researchers involved protested, including John McCarthy of Stanford, but they were being funded by ARPA so had no choice in the matter (Isaacson 108).

  • Nuclear War Belief

    Nuclear War Belief
    Since ARPANET was a concept, it was believed to be a safety measure in case of nuclear attack, since the packet-switching it used would survive an attack better than other methods. While it is unclear whether or not it was designed for this purpose, enough people believed it was that they kept funding an otherwise near-useless project.

  • ARPANET Begins

    ARPANET Begins
    Roberts receives the formal authorization and appropriation to begin building the time-sharing network. During this time, with the Vietnam War and antiwar propaganda running rampant, the public opinion was that the project was unnecessary and irrelevant (Isaacson 114).

  • Minicomputer Bids

    Minicomputer Bids
    Roberts sent out messages for bids from various companies, to build the minicomputers that each node of ARPANET would have as the routers, or Interface Message Processors. BBN was selected over Raytheon, due to a dislike of the corporate bureaucracy at Raytheon (Isaacson 115).

  • First Connection

    First Connection
    The second IMP minicomputer reached Stanford, and connected to the first one at UCLA. The message sent over 350 miles between them read "LO" meaning 'lo and behold' (Isaacson 117).

  • The Internet

    The Internet
    Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf come up with a common protocol between networks, called the Internet Protocol, with a Transmission Control Protocol alongside. The TCP/IP became the foundation the the internetwork they imagined, that would become the Internet (Isaacson 118).

  • Email

    Email
    Less than two years after electronic mail was invented, it accounted for around 75% of all traffic on ARPANET. Email led to the creation of virtual communities, with mailing lists and eventually bulletin board discussion forums (Isaacson 174).

  • CSNET

    CSNET
    Lawrence Landweber created the network CSNET, based on TCP/IP protocols, to connect multiple universities that were not connected by ARPANET. CSNET later "became the forerunner of a network funded by the National Science Foundation, NSFNET" (Isaacson 174).

  • Twentieth Anniversary

    Twentieth Anniversary
    Kleinrock, Cerf, and numerous others who were instrumental in the creation of Internet gathered at UCLA, where the first node of ARPANET was. They celebrated how far they had come since 1969.

  • Open Internet

    Open Internet
    Vice President Al Gore pushed the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993, which made the Internet available to the general public and made it commercial so both private and government investment could fund it. The Digital Revolution was woven together, as a new era of innovation began (Isaacson 180).