The Internet has come a long way since it started in the early 1960’s.

Click Here to read our exclusive interviews with two of the people that helped to create the internet (Leonard Kleinrock and Lawrence Roberts).

If you see a word you dont understand, try clicking on it to go to our glossary section for an explanation.

The 1960's

The man who came up with the idea of global networking in 1962 was J.C.R. Licklider from MIT. Licklider then moved to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to develop his idea.

Leonard Kleinrock came up with the idea for ‘packet switching’, the form of basic internet connections, but the first actual connection between two computers was done in 1965 by Lawrence Roberts, who connected a computer from Massachusetts and a computer from California together through telephone dial-up lines. This test proved Kleinrock’s theory of ‘packet switching’ to be correct, however, there were still plenty of problems using the telephone lines. Lawrence Roberts moved to DARPA in 1966 to develop his idea of ARPANET, which developed into being today’s Internet. In 1969, ARPANET was brought online, and connected four big computers from four major universities; UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah.