ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.
Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers. Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the request for proposal to build the network. He incorporated Donald Davies' concepts and designs for packet switching, and sought input from Paul Baran. In 1969, ARPA awarded the contract to build the Interface Message Processors for the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman. The design was led by Bob Kahn who developed the first protocol for the network. Roberts engaged Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA to develop mathematical methods for analyzing the packet network technology.
The first computers were connected in 1969 and the Network Control Program was implemented in 1970, development of which was led by Steve Crocker at UCLA and other graduate students, including Jon Postel. The network was declared operational in 1971. Further software development enabled remote login and file transfer, which was used to provide an early form of email. The network expanded rapidly and operational control passed to the Defense Communications Agency in 1975.
Bob Kahn moved to DARPA and, together with Vint Cerf at Stanford University, formulated the Transmission Control Program for internetworking. As this work progressed, a protocol was developed by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks; this incorporated concepts pioneered in the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin and the ideas of Bob Metcalfe at Xerox Parc. Version 4 of TCP/IP was installed in the ARPANET for production use on January 1, 1983, after the Department of Defense made it standard for all military computer networking.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation funded the Computer Science Network. In the early 1980s, the NSF funded the establishment of national supercomputing centers at several universities and provided network access and network interconnectivity with the NSFNET project in 1986. The ARPANET was formally decommissioned in 1990, after partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry had assured private sector expansion and commercialization of an expanded worldwide network, known as the Internet.
Inspiration
Historically, voice and data communications were based on methods of circuit switching, as exemplified in the traditional telephone network, wherein each telephone call is allocated a dedicated end-to-end electronic connection between the two communicating stations. The connection is established by switching systems that connected multiple intermediate call legs between these systems for the duration of the call.The traditional model of the circuit-switched telecommunication network was challenged in the early 1960s by Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation, who had been researching systems that could sustain operation during partial destruction, such as by nuclear war. He developed the theoretical model of distributed adaptive message block switching. However, the telecommunication establishment rejected the development in favor of existing models. Donald Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory independently arrived at a similar concept in 1965.
The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users were formulated by computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider of Bolt Beranek and Newman, in April 1963, in memoranda discussing the concept of the "Intergalactic Computer Network". Those ideas encompassed many of the features of the contemporary Internet. In October 1963, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. He convinced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this network concept was very important and merited development, although Licklider left ARPA before any contracts were assigned for development.
Sutherland and Taylor continued their interest in creating the network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to utilize computers provided by ARPA, and, in part, to quickly distribute new software and other computer science results. Taylor had three computer terminals in his office, each connected to separate computers, which ARPA was funding: one for the System Development Corporation Q-32 in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley, and another for Multics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor recalls the circumstance: "For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So, if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C., and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley, or M.I.T., about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. I said, 'Oh Man!', it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go. That idea is the ARPANET".
Donald Davies' work caught the attention of ARPANET developers at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967. He gave the first public presentation, having coined the term packet switching, in August 1968 and incorporated it into the NPL network in England. The NPL network, followed by the ARPANET, were the first two networks in the world to implement packet switching. Roberts said the computer networks built in the 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to Davies' original 1965 design.
Creation
In February 1966, Bob Taylor successfully lobbied ARPA's Director Charles M. Herzfeld to fund a network project. Herzfeld redirected funds in the amount of one million dollars from a ballistic missile defense program to Taylor's budget. Taylor hired Larry Roberts as a program manager in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office in January 1967 to work on the ARPANET. Roberts met Paul Baran in February 1967, but did not discuss networks.Roberts asked Frank Westervelt to explore the questions of message size and contents for the network, and to write a position paper on the intercomputer communication protocol including “conventions for character and block transmission, error checking and re-transmission, and computer and user identification." In April 1967, ARPA held a design session on technical standards. The initial standards for identification and authentication of users, transmission of characters, and error checking and retransmission procedures were discussed. Roberts' proposal was that all mainframe computers would connect to one another directly. The other investigators were reluctant to dedicate these computing resources to network administration. After the design session, Wesley Clark proposed minicomputers should be used as an interface to create a message switching network. Roberts modified the ARPANET plan to incorporate Clark's suggestion and named the minicomputers Interface Message Processors.
The plan was presented at the inaugural Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967. Donald Davies' work on packet switching and the NPL network, presented by a colleague, and that of Paul Baran, came to the attention of the ARPA investigators at this conference. Roberts applied Davies' concept of packet switching for the ARPANET, and sought input from Paul Baran on dynamic routing. The NPL network was using line speeds of 768 kbit/s, and the proposed line speed for the ARPANET was upgraded from 2.4 kbit/s to 50 kbit/s.
By mid-1968, Roberts and Barry Wessler wrote a final version of the IMP specification based on a Stanford Research Institute report that ARPA commissioned to write detailed specifications describing the ARPANET communications network. Roberts gave a report to Taylor on 3 June, who approved it on 21 June. After approval by ARPA, a Request for Quotation was issued for 140 potential bidders. Most computer science companies regarded the ARPA proposal as outlandish, and only twelve submitted bids to build a network; of the twelve, ARPA regarded only four as top-rank contractors. At year's end, ARPA considered only two contractors and awarded the contract to build the network to BBN in January 1969.
The initial, seven-person BBN team were much aided by the technical specificity of their response to the ARPA RFQ, and thus quickly produced the first working system. The "IMP guys" were led by Frank Heart; the theoretical design of the network was led by Bob Kahn; the team included Dave Walden, Severo Ornstein, William Crowther and several others. The BBN-proposed network closely followed Roberts' ARPA plan: a network composed of small computers, the IMPs, that functioned as gateways interconnecting local resources. Routing, flow control, software design and network control were developed by the BBN team. At each site, the IMPs performed store-and-forward packet switching functions and were interconnected with leased lines via telecommunication data sets, with initial data rates of. The host computers were connected to the IMPs via custom serial communication interfaces. The system, including the hardware and the packet switching software, was designed and installed in nine months. The BBN team continued to interact with the NPL team with meetings between them taking place in the U.S. and the U.K.
As with the NPL network, the first-generation IMPs were built using a rugged computer version of the Honeywell DDP-516 computer, configured with of expandable magnetic-core memory, and a 16-channel Direct Multiplex Control direct memory access unit. The DMC established custom interfaces with each of the host computers and modems. In addition to the front-panel lamps, the DDP-516 computer also features a special set of 24 indicator lamps showing the status of the IMP communication channels. Each IMP could support up to four local hosts and could communicate with up to six remote IMPs via early Digital Signal 0 leased telephone lines. The network connected one computer in Utah with three in California. Later, the Department of Defense allowed the universities to join the network for sharing hardware and software resources.