L... O... what have we done?
It is 50 years today since the first message was sent on the ARPANET, a precursor of the internet as we know it today.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) can trace its roots back to 1962 and MIT computer scientist Joseph Licklider's "Galactic Network" concept. Around the same time, Leonard Kleinrock, also at MIT, published an early paper on packet-switching theory (PDF).
Licklider went on to head up the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA in 1962 and, during his two-year stint there, impressed his vision upon his successors, Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor, and a researcher called Lawrence Roberts.....MORE (including the answer to the headline questuion)
Convinced by Kleinrock of the feasibility of sharing communication using packets rather than dedicated circuits, Roberts joined DARPA. He spent 1967 working with other engineers and scientists to come up with a design for the network to authenticate users, deal with errors and retransmission before presenting it as the ARPANET plan at the Association for Computing Machinery conference in Tennessee.
At the same conference was a paper from Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury on the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) network, a packet-switching network which had been piloted in 1967. Paul Baran and other academics at the RAND group had also written a packet-switching paper, also independently of the others.
Roberts stirred the ideas regarding packet-switching into the ARPANET pot and added input from Kleinrock to come up with a complete plan for the network by mid-1968. A key facet was that rather than the hulking mainframes of the time (which would be the nodes), minicomputers known as Interface Message Processors (IMPs) would be used to interface to the packet-switched network....
