It began life under the name ARPANet in 1969. It was born in the U.S.A., created in the midst of the Cold War by the government as a strategic mechanism that would provide for the emission and reception of electronic communication signals in the event of a world catastrophe. Commissioned by the Department of Defense, four computers called nodes were connected using modems, telephone wires and satellites, one each at UCLA, UCSB, Stanford and University of Utah. ARPANet stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its purpose was to share information and results of research among the various scientists involved in Department of Defense projects. Each node was specifically designed io be independent of the others in case of that aforementioned world catastrophe.

Meanwhile, the Merit Network was being established between Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan for the use of its students, faculty and ahimni to access various documents and services such as the weather. This non- defense-related information sharing network is still in service today. in 1971, email was “invented.” Ray Tomlinson devised the use of the @ sign to make email possible, it is a program to send messages across a distributed network, it was not as fancy as the programs you are all accustomed to using, but it did the job. And ARPANet continued to grow, it consisted of 23 host computers.

In 1973, ARPANet became an international network when the University of London and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway came “on-line.” This was the first link between the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Seven years passed before the next significant development occurred. In 1980, Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, a disorganized physicist, developed Enquire as his personal memory substitute. It allowed him to nil a document with words that, when clicked, would lead to other documents for elaboration and explanation. This was called hypertext and it was not a new idea; it had been proposed by another scientist in 1945, but the technology to apply the idea did not exist at that time. Dr. Berners-Lee created the program for hypertext links. [Remember that name: Dr. Tim Berners-Lee!]

In 1982, transmission control protocol/Internet protocol was established. When two computers begin to communicate with each other, they first “handshake” with a set of audible tones. Standards were needed so that all the various groups using the network for messaging could communicate. TCP/IP is this common language. All the pieces were in place for the Internet. But it was still used by only a relative few. In 1983, all that changed. The PC evolved and began appearing in offices. This event made internal networking possible, if expensive. The networking was in place, so branching out was simply a matter of adding the telephone to the networking equation. And the rest is history.

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