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The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States forms the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the
military.
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Backbones: None - Hosts: None |
1962 |
RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study
on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be
a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the
U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.
Baran's finished
document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.
"Packet
switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the
destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the
information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If
packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."
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Backbones: None - Hosts: None |
1968 |
ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a
Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four
nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits. |
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Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 4 |
1972 |
The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN.
The Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA)
ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.
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Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 23 |
1973 |
Development began on the protocol
later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This
new
protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other. |
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 23+ |