The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally inter-connected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.
In late 1966
Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put
together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the conference
where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept
from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told
Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND.
The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice
in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND
(1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any
of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted
from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design
was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps.
In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team at UCLA.
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Introduction
Origin
of Internet, Part 2