The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite.
In the late1960’s the U.S. military was desperately afraid of a nuclear attack from theSoviet Union. The United States formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)within the Department of Defense to establish a bombproof network to connectmilitary bases.
ARPANET’s physical network was established in 1969 to enableuniversities and research organizations to exchange information freely. Thefirst two nodes that formed the ARPANET were UCLA and the Stanford ResearchInstitute, shortly after the University of Utah was added to ARPANET. TheNetwork Control Protocol (NCP) was initially used as the ARPANET protocol,beginning in 1970. By 1971, a total of 23 hosts at 15 locations were connectedto the ARPANET. The following year, the first international connectionsoccurred, linking the University College of London (UK) and the Royal RadarEstablishment (Norway) to the ARPANET. The way ARPANET was set up is so that ifone of the network links became disrupted by enemy attack, the traffic on itcould automatically be rerouted to other links.
Fortunately, the Net rarely hascome under enemy attack. In the 1970s, ARPA also sponsored further research intothe applications of packet switching technologies. This included extendingpacket switching to ships at sea and ground mobile units and the use of radiofor packet switching. Ethernet was created during the course of research intothe use of radio for packet switching, and it was found that coaxial cable couldsupport the movement of data at extremely fast rates of speed. The developmentof Ethernet was crucial to the growth of local area computer networks.
Thesuccess of ARPANET made it difficult to manage, particularly with the large andgrowing number of university sites on it. So it was broken into two parts. Thetwo parts consisted of MILNET, which had the military sites, and the new,smaller ARPANET, which had the nonmilitary sites. On January 1,1983, everymachine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internetprotocol and replaced NCP (old ARPANET language) completely. Thanks to TCP/IPMILNET and ARPANET remained connected through a technical scheme called IP(Internet Protocol); which enables traffic to be routed from one network toanother as necessary.
All the networks connected to the Internet speak IP, sothey all can exchange messages. Although there were only two networks at thattime, IP was designed to allow for tens of thousands of networks. An unusualfact about the IP design is that every computer on an IP network is just ascapable as any other, so any machine can communicate with any other machine. In1985 the National Science Foundation began announcing plans for its new T1lines, which would be finished by 1988.
Soon after the completion of the T1backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgradingthe network again. The same year the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps was introducedto the public. While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department ofDefense disbanded the ARPANET and the T1 and later T3 backbone replaced ARPANET.The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.
In 1990 ARPANETwas replaced by the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), the samecompany that founded the t1 and t3, to connect its supercomputers to regionalnetworks. In my opinion I think the government did an excellent job indeveloping the Internet. Essentially, the ARPANET can be viewed as the embryofrom which the Internet grew. The government fostered and encouraged the growthof private Internet corporations. Today the Internet spans across all 7continents and connects the whole world with some clicks of a mouse and typingat the keyboard.Bibliography1.
)Casting the Net: From Arpanet to Internet and Beyond (Unix and OpenSystems Series) Peter H. Salus / Paperback / Published 1995 2.) Building theArpanet: Unpublished Source Documents of the First Peter Salus(Editor) /Hardcover / Published 1998
