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The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first 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 (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Building on the ideas of
J. C. R. Licklider Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable access to remote computers. Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the network design. He incorporated Donald Davies' concepts and designs for packet switching, and sought input from Paul Baran. ARPA awarded the contract to build the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman who developed the first
protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...
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 Protocol was implemented in 1970. The network was declared operational in 1971. Further software development enabled
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, file transfer and email. The network expanded rapidly and operational control passed to the
Defense Communications Agency The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), known as the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) until 1991, is a United States Department of Defense (DoD) combat support agency composed of military, federal civilians, and contractors. DISA prov ...
in 1975. Internetworking research in the early 1970s led by Bob Kahn at DARPA and Vint Cerf at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
and later DARPA formulated the Transmission Control Program, which incorporated concepts from the French CYCLADES project. As this work progressed, a protocol was developed by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Version 4 of TCP/IP was installed in the ARPANET for production use in January 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 (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). 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 future commercialization of an expanded world-wide network, known as the Internet.


History


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 The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed ...
, 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 (NPL) 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 A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
J. C. R. Licklider Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
of Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), in April 1963, in memoranda discussing the concept of the "
Intergalactic Computer Network Intergalactic Computer Network or Galactic Network (IGCN) was a computer networking concept similar to today's Internet. J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at The Pentagon's ARPA, used th ...
". 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 (ARPA). He convinced
Ivan Sutherland Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subje ...
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 (SDC) 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 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 and ARPANET were the first two networks in the world to use packet switching.; (source: Gatlinburg, ... Association for Computing Machinery) Roberts said the ARPANET and other packet switching 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 Charles Maria Herzfeld (June 29, 1925 – February 23, 2017) was an Austrian-born American scientist and scientific manager, particularly for the US Government. He is best known for his time as Director of DARPA, during which, among other thing ...
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 asked Frank Westervelt to explore the initial design questions for a network."Planning the ARPANET: 1967-1968" in Chapter 2 on Networking: Vision and Packet Switching 1959-1968 Intergalactic Vision to Arpanet, ''Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968-1988''
James Pelkey, 2007
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. 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 (IMPs). 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 ( Roger Scantlebury), 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. 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 (SRI) 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 (RFQ) 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. This team was led by Frank Heart and included Robert Kahn and Dave Walden. The BBN-proposed network closely followed Roberts' ARPA plan: a network composed of small computers called Interface Message Processors (or IMPs), similar to the later concept of routers, that functioned as gateways interconnecting local resources. At each site, the IMPs performed store-and-forward packet switching functions, and were interconnected with
leased line A leased line is a private telecommunications circuit between two or more locations provided according to a commercial contract. It is sometimes also known as a private circuit, and as a data line in the UK. Typically, leased lines are used by ...
s via telecommunication data sets ( modems), with initial data rates of . The host computers were connected to the IMPs via custom
serial communication In telecommunication and data transmission, serial communication is the process of sending data one bit at a time, sequentially, over a communication channel or computer bus. This is in contrast to parallel communication, where several bits are ...
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. The first-generation IMPs were built by BBN Technologies using a rugged computer version of the Honeywell
DDP-516 The Honeywell 316 was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Honeywell starting in 1969. It is part of the Series 16, which includes the Models 116 (1965, discrete), 316 (1969), 416 (1966), 516 (1966) and DDP-716 (1969). They were commonly used f ...
computer, configured with of expandable magnetic-core memory, and a 16-channel Direct Multiplex Control (DMC) 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 Digital Signal 0 (DS0) is a basic digital signaling rate of 64 kilobits per second (kbit/s), corresponding to the capacity of one analog voice-frequency-equivalent communication channel. The DS0 rate, and its equivalents E0 in the E-carrier system ...
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.


Debate on design goals

According to Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965–1967): Nonetheless, according to
Stephen J. Lukasik Stephen Joseph Lukasik (March 19, 1931 – October 3, 2019) was an American physicist who served in multiple high-level defense and scientific related positions for advancing the technologies and techniques for national defense and the detection ...
, who as deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development": The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation, and frequent re-computation, of routing tables. This increased the survivability of the network in the face of significant interruption. Automatic routing was technically challenging at the time. The ARPANET was designed to survive subordinate-network losses, since the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. The Internet Society agrees with Herzfeld in a footnote in their online article, ''A Brief History of the Internet'': Paul Baran, the first to put forward a theoretical model for communication using packet switching, conducted the RAND study referenced above. Though the ARPANET did not exactly share Baran's project's goal, he said his work did contribute to the development of the ARPANET. Minutes taken by Elmer Shapiro of Stanford Research Institute at the ARPANET design meeting of 9–10 October 1967 indicate that a version of Baran's routing method ("hot potato") may be used, consistent with the NPL team's proposal at the Symposium on Operating System Principles in Gatlinburg.


Implementation

The first four nodes were designated as a testbed for developing and debugging the
1822 protocol The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. An IMP was a r ...
, which was a major undertaking. While they were connected electronically in 1969, network applications were not possible until the Network Control Protocol was implemented in 1970 enabling the first two host-host protocols, remote login ( Telnet) and file transfer ( FTP) which were specified and implemented between 1969 and 1973. The network was declared operational in 1971. Network traffic began to grow once email was established at the majority of sites by around 1973.


Initial four hosts

The first four IMPs were: * University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Leonard Kleinrock had established a Network Measurement Center, with an SDS Sigma 7 being the first computer attached to it; * The
Augmentation Research Center SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come ...
at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), where
Douglas Engelbart Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...
had created the new NLS system, an early
hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
system, and would run the Network Information Center (NIC), with the SDS 940 that ran NLS, named "Genie", being the first host attached; * University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center's IBM 360/75, running
OS/MVT OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB ...
being the machine attached; * The
University of Utah School of Computing The School of Computing is a school within the College of Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. School of Computing The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science. The school has major research ...
, where
Ivan Sutherland Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subje ...
had moved, running a DEC PDP-10 operating on TENEX. The first successful host-to-host connection on the ARPANET was made between Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and UCLA, by SRI programmer Bill Duvall and UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969). Kline connected from UCLA's
SDS Sigma 7 The SDS Sigma series is a series of third generation computers that were introduced by Scientific Data Systems of the United States in 1966. The first machines in the series are the 16-bit Sigma 2 and the 32-bit Sigma 7; the Sigma 7 was the firs ...
Host computer (in Boelter Hall room 3420) to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 Host computer. Kline typed the command "login," but initially the SDS 940 crashed after he typed two characters. About an hour later, after Duvall adjusted parameters on the machine, Kline tried again and successfully logged in. Hence, the first two characters successfully transmitted over the ARPANET were "lo". The first permanent ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By 5 December 1969, the initial four-node network was established.
Elizabeth Feinler Elizabeth Jocelyn "Jake" Feinler (born March 2, 1931) is an American information scientist. From 1972 until 1989 she was director of the Network Information Systems Center at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International). Her group operated ...
created the first Resource Handbook for ARPANET in 1969 which led to the development of the ARPANET directory. The directory, built by Feinler and a team made it possible to navigate the ARPANET.


Growth and evolution

Roberts engaged Howard Frank to consult on the topological design of the network. Frank made recommendations to increase throughput and reduce costs in a scaled-up network. By March 1970, the ARPANET reached the East Coast of the United States, when an IMP at BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts was connected to the network. Thereafter, the ARPANET grew: 9 IMPs by June 1970 and 13 IMPs by December 1970, then 18 by September 1971 (when the network included 23 university and government hosts); 29 IMPs by August 1972, and 40 by September 1973. By June 1974, there were 46 IMPs, and in July 1975, the network numbered 57 IMPs. By 1981, the number was 213 host computers, with another host connecting approximately every twenty days. Support for inter-IMP circuits of up to 230.4 kbit/s was added in 1970, although considerations of cost and IMP processing power meant this capability was not actively used. Larry Roberts saw the ARPANET and NPL projects as complementary and sought in 1970 to connect them via a satellite link. Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London (UCL) was subsequently chosen in 1971 in place of NPL for the UK connection. In June 1973, a transatlantic satellite link connected ARPANET to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR), via the Tanum Earth Station in Sweden, and onward via a terrestrial circuit to a TIP at UCL. UCL provided a gateway for interconnection with British academic and research networks and a testbed for international internetworking. 1971 saw the start of the use of the non-ruggedized (and therefore significantly lighter) Honeywell 316 as an IMP. It could also be configured as a Terminal Interface Processor (TIP), which provided terminal server support for up to 63 ASCII serial terminals through a multi-line controller in place of one of the hosts. The 316 featured a greater degree of integration than the 516, which made it less expensive and easier to maintain. The 316 was configured with 40 kB of core memory for a TIP. The size of core memory was later increased, to 32 kB for the IMPs, and 56 kB for TIPs, in 1973. In 1975, BBN introduced IMP software running on the
Pluribus The Pluribus''Pluribus'' is the ablative plural of the Latin word for "more" or "above." multiprocessor was an early multi-processor computer designed by BBN for use as a packet switch in the ARPANET. Its design later influenced the BBN Butterf ...
multi-processor. These appeared in a few sites. In 1981, BBN introduced IMP software running on its own C/30 processor product.


Network performance

In 1968, Roberts contracted with Kleinrock to measure the performance of the network and find areas for improvement. Building on his earlier work on queueing theory, Kleinrock specified mathematical models of the performance of packet-switched networks, which underpinned the development of the ARPANET as it expanded rapidly in the early 1970s.


Operation

ARPA was intended to fund advanced research. The ARPANET was a research project that was communications-oriented, rather than user-oriented in design. Nonetheless, in the summer of 1975, operational control of the ARPANET passed to the
Defense Communications Agency The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), known as the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) until 1991, is a United States Department of Defense (DoD) combat support agency composed of military, federal civilians, and contractors. DISA prov ...
. At about this time, the first
ARPANET encryption devices The ARPANET pioneered the creation of novel encryption devices for packet networks in the 1970s and 1980s, and as such were ancestors to today's IPsec architecture, and High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryptor (HAIPE) devices more specifically ...
were deployed to support classified traffic. The transatlantic connectivity with NORSAR and UCL later evolved into the
SATNET SATNET, also known as the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network, was an early satellite network that formed an initial segment of the Internet. It was implemented by BBN Technologies under the direction of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. T ...
. The ARPANET, SATNET and PRNET were interconnected in 1977. The ''ARPANET Completion Report'', published in 1981 jointly by BBN and DARPA, concludes that:


CSNET, expansion

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET).


Adoption of TCP/IP

The DoD made TCP/IP the standard communication protocol for all military computer networking in 1980. NORSAR and University College London left the ARPANET and began using TCP/IP over SATNET in early 1982. On January 1, 1983, known as flag day, TCP/IP protocols became the standard for the ARPANET, replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol.


MILNET, phasing out

In September 1984 work was completed on restructuring the ARPANET giving U.S. military sites their own Military Network ( MILNET) for unclassified defense department communications. Both networks carried unclassified information, and were connected at a small number of controlled gateways which would allow total separation in the event of an emergency. MILNET was part of the
Defense Data Network The Defense Data Network (DDN) was a computer networking effort of the United States Department of Defense from 1983 through 1995. It was based on ARPANET technology. History As an experiment, from 1971 to 1977, the Worldwide Military Command an ...
(DDN). Separating the civil and military networks reduced the 113-node ARPANET by 68 nodes. After MILNET was split away, the ARPANET would continue be used as an Internet backbone for researchers, but be slowly phased out.


Decommissioning

In 1985, 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. NSFNET became the Internet backbone for government agencies and universities. The ARPANET project was formally decommissioned in 1990. The original IMPs and TIPs were phased out as the ARPANET was shut down after the introduction of the NSFNet, but some IMPs remained in service as late as July 1990. In the wake of the decommissioning of the ARPANET on 28 February 1990, Vinton Cerf wrote the following lamentation, entitled "Requiem of the ARPANET":


Legacy

The ARPANET was related to many other research projects, which either influenced the ARPANET design, or which were ancillary projects or spun out of the ARPANET. Senator
Al Gore Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was the Democratic Part ...
authored the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill", after hearing the 1988 concept for a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by Leonard Kleinrock. The bill was passed on 9 December 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore called the '' information superhighway''. Inter-networking protocols developed by ARPA and implemented on the ARPANET paved the way for future commercialization of a new world-wide network, known as the Internet. The ARPANET project was honored with two IEEE Milestones, both dedicated in 2009.


Software and protocols


IMP functionality

Because it was never a goal for the ARPANET to support IMPs from vendors other than BBN, the IMP-to-IMP protocol and message format were not standardized. However, the IMPs did nonetheless communicate amongst themselves to perform
link-state routing Link-state routing protocols are one of the two main classes of routing protocols used in packet switching networks for computer communications, the others being distance-vector routing protocols. Examples of link-state routing protocols include ...
, to do reliable forwarding of messages, and to provide remote monitoring and management functions to ARPANET's Network Control Center. Initially, each IMP had a 6-bit identifier, and supported up to 4 hosts, which were identified with a 2-bit index. An ARPANET host address, therefore, consisted of both the port index on its IMP and the identifier of the IMP, which was written with either port/IMP notation or as a single byte; for example, the address of MIT-DMG (notable for hosting development of Zork) could be written as either 1/6 or 70. An upgrade in early 1976 extended the host and IMP numbering to 8-bit and 16-bit, respectively. In addition to primary routing and forwarding responsibilities, the IMP ran several background programs, titled TTY, DEBUG, PARAMETER-CHANGE, DISCARD, TRACE, and STATISTICS. These were given host numbers in order to be addressed directly and provided functions independently of any connected host. For example, "TTY" allowed an on-site operator to send ARPANET packets manually via the teletype connected directly to the IMP.


1822 protocol

The starting point for host-to-host communication on the ARPANET in 1969 was the
1822 protocol The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. An IMP was a r ...
, which defined the transmission of messages to an IMP. The message format was designed to work unambiguously with a broad range of computer architectures. An 1822 message essentially consisted of a message type, a numeric host address, and a data field. To send a data message to another host, the transmitting host formatted a data message containing the destination host's address and the data message being sent, and then transmitted the message through the 1822 hardware interface. The IMP then delivered the message to its destination address, either by delivering it to a locally connected host, or by delivering it to another IMP. When the message was ultimately delivered to the destination host, the receiving IMP would transmit a ''Ready for Next Message'' (RFNM) acknowledgement to the sending, host IMP.


Network Control Protocol

Unlike modern Internet datagrams, the ARPANET was designed to reliably transmit 1822 messages, and to inform the host computer when it loses a message; the contemporary IP is unreliable, whereas the
TCP TCP may refer to: Science and technology * Transformer coupled plasma * Tool Center Point, see Robot end effector Computing * Transmission Control Protocol, a fundamental Internet standard * Telephony control protocol, a Bluetooth communication s ...
is reliable. Nonetheless, the 1822 protocol proved inadequate for handling multiple connections among different applications residing in a host computer. This problem was addressed with the Network Control Protocol (NCP), which provided a standard method to establish reliable, flow-controlled, bidirectional communications links among different processes in different host computers. The NCP interface allowed application software to connect across the ARPANET by implementing higher-level
communication protocols A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchron ...
, an early example of the ''protocol layering'' concept later incorporated in the OSI model. NCP was developed under the leadership of Stephen D. Crocker, then a graduate student at UCLA. Crocker created and led the Network Working Group (NWG) which was made up of a collection of graduate students at universities and research laboratories sponsored by ARPA to carry out the development of the ARPANET and the software for the host computers that supported applications. The various application protocols such as TELNET for remote time-sharing access, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and rudimentary electronic mail protocols were developed and eventually ported to run over the TCP/IP protocol suite or replaced in the case of email by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.


TCP/IP

Steve Crocker Stephen D. Crocker (born October 15, 1944) is the inventor of the Request for Comments series, authoring the first RFC and many more. He attended Van Nuys High School, as did Vint Cerf and Jon Postel. Crocker received his bachelor's degree (196 ...
formed a "Networking Working Group" in 1969 with Vint Cerf, who also joined an International Networking Working Group in 1972. These groups considered how to interconnect packet switching networks with different specifications, that is, internetworking.
Stephen J. Lukasik Stephen Joseph Lukasik (March 19, 1931 – October 3, 2019) was an American physicist who served in multiple high-level defense and scientific related positions for advancing the technologies and techniques for national defense and the detection ...
directed DARPA to focus on internetworking research in the early 1970s. Research led by Bob Kahn at DARPA and Vint Cerf at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
and later DARPA resulted in the formulation of the
Transmission Control Program The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. IP ...
, which incorporated concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin. Its specification was written by Cerf with Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in December 1974 (). The following year, testing began through concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN and University College London. At first a monolithic design, the software was redesigned as a modular protocol stack in version 3 in 1978. Version 4 was installed in the ARPANET for production use in January 1983, replacing NCP. The development of the complete Internet protocol suite by 1989, as outlined in and , and partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry laid the foundation for the adoption of TCP/IP as a comprehensive protocol suite as the core component of the emerging Internet.


Network applications

NCP provided a standard set of network services that could be shared by several applications running on a single host computer. This led to the evolution of ''application protocols'' that operated, more or less, independently of the underlying network service, and permitted independent advances in the underlying protocols. Telnet was developed in 1969 beginning with RFC 15, extended in RFC 855. The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by
Abhay Bhushan Abhay Bhushan Pandey (; born 23 November 1944) is an Indian computer scientist. Bhushan has been a major contributor to the development of the Internet TCP/IP architecture, and is the author of the File Transfer Protocol (which he started worki ...
and published as on 16 April 1971. By 1973, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification had been defined () and implemented, enabling file transfers over the ARPANET. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, of BBN sent the first network e-mail (, ). Within a few years, e-mail came to represent a very large part of the overall ARPANET traffic. The
Network Voice Protocol The Network Voice Protocol (NVP) was a pioneering computer network protocol for transporting human speech over packetized communications networks. It was an early example of Voice over Internet Protocol technology. History NVP was first define ...
(NVP) specifications were defined in 1977 (), and implemented. But, because of technical shortcomings, conference calls over the ARPANET never worked well; the contemporary Voice over Internet Protocol (packet voice) was decades away.


Password protection

The Purdy Polynomial hash algorithm was developed for the ARPANET to protect passwords in 1971 at the request of Larry Roberts, head of ARPA at that time. It computed a polynomial of degree 224 + 17 modulo the 64-bit prime ''p'' = 264 − 59. The algorithm was later used by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to hash passwords in the
VMS #REDIRECT VMS {{redirect category shell, {{R from other capitalisation{{R from ambiguous page ...
operating system and is still being used for this purpose.


Rules and etiquette

Because of its government funding, certain forms of traffic were discouraged or prohibited. Leonard Kleinrock claims to have committed the first illegal act on the Internet, having sent a request for return of his electric razor after a meeting in England in 1973. At the time, use of the ARPANET for personal reasons was unlawful. In 1978, against the rules of the network, Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent out the first mass email to approximately 400 potential clients via the ARPANET. He claims that this resulted in $13 million worth of sales in DEC products, and highlighted the potential of email marketing. A 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's
AI Lab Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...
stated regarding network etiquette:


In popular culture

* '' Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing'', a 30-minute documentary film featuring
Fernando J. Corbató Fernando José "Corby" Corbató (July 1, 1926 – July 12, 2019) was a prominent American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems. Career Corbató was born on July 1, 1926 in Oakland, Califo ...
,
J. C. R. Licklider Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
,
Lawrence G. Roberts Lawrence Gilman Roberts (December 21, 1937 – December 26, 2018) was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002. As a program manager and later o ...
, Robert Kahn, Frank Heart,
William R. Sutherland William Robert Sutherland (May 10, 1936 – February 18, 2020) was an American computer scientist who was the longtime manager of three prominent research laboratories, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories (1992–1998), the Systems Sci ...
, Richard W. Watson,
John R. Pasta John Robert Pasta (October 22, 1918 – June 5, 1981) was an American computational physicist and computer scientist who is remembered today for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou experiment, the result of which was much discussed among physicis ...
,
Donald W. Davies Donald Watts Davies, (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL). In 1965 he conceived of packet switching, which is today the dominant basis for data communica ...
, and economist,
George W. Mitchell George Wilder Mitchell (February 23, 1904 – January 25, 1997) was an American economist who served as the 9th vice chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1973 to 1976. Prior to his term as vice chairman, Mitchell served as a member of the Fe ...
. * "Scenario", an episode of the U.S. television sitcom ''Benson'' (season 6, episode 20—dated February 1985), was the first incidence of a popular TV show directly referencing the Internet or its progenitors. The show includes a scene in which the ARPANET is accessed. * There is an electronic music artist known as "Arpanet",
Gerald Donald Gerald Donald is a Detroit techno producer and artist. With James Stinson he formed the afrofuturist techno duo Drexciya, and he is the main member of Dopplereffekt. Biography Donald is notoriously silent on himself and even his involvement with v ...
, one of the members of Drexciya. The artist's 2002 album ''Wireless Internet'' features commentary on the expansion of the internet via wireless communication, with songs such as '' NTT DoCoMo'', dedicated to the mobile communications giant based in Japan. * Thomas Pynchon mentions the ARPANET in his 2009 novel '' Inherent Vice'', which is set in Los Angeles in 1970, and in his 2013 novel '' Bleeding Edge''. * The 1993 television series '' The X-Files'' featured the ARPANET in a season 5 episode, titled " Unusual Suspects". John Fitzgerald Byers offers to help Susan Modeski (known as Holly ... "just like the sugar") by hacking into the ARPANET to obtain sensitive information. * In the spy-drama television series '' The Americans'', a Russian scientist defector offers access to ARPANET to the Russians in a plea to not be repatriated (Season 2 Episode 5 "The Deal"). Episode 7 of Season 2 is named 'ARPANET' and features Russian infiltration to bug the network. * In the television series ''
Person of Interest "Person of interest" is a term used by law enforcement in the United States, Canada, and other countries when identifying someone possibly involved in a criminal investigation who has not been arrested or formally accused of a crime. It has no leg ...
'', main character Harold Finch hacked the ARPANET in 1980 using a homemade computer during his first efforts to build a prototype of the Machine. This corresponds with the real life virus that occurred in October of that year that temporarily halted ARPANET functions. The ARPANET hack was first discussed in the episode ''2PiR'' (stylised ''2\piR'') where a computer science teacher called it the most famous hack in history and one that was never solved. Finch later mentioned it to Person of Interest Caleb Phipps and his role was first indicated when he showed knowledge that it was done by "a kid with a homemade computer" which Phipps, who had researched the hack, had never heard before. * In the third season of the television series '' Halt and Catch Fire'', the character Joe MacMillan explores the potential commercialization of the ARPANET.


See also

*
.arpa The domain name arpa is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It is used predominantly for the management of technical network infrastructure. Prominent among such functions are the subdomains ''in-addr.arpa'' ...
top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
used exclusively for technical infrastructure purposes * * * * *
Protocol Wars A long-running debate in computer science known as the Protocol Wars occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most r ...
* , "A Poor Man's ARPAnet"


References


Sources

*


Further reading

* * * * * * * *


Oral histories

* Focuses on Kahn's role in the development of computer networking from 1967 through the early 1980s. Beginning with his work at BBN, Kahn discusses his involvement as the ARPANET proposal was being written and then implemented, and his role in the public demonstration of the ARPANET. The interview continues into Kahn's involvement with networking when he moves to IPTO in 1972, where he was responsible for the administrative and technical evolution of the ARPANET, including programs in packet radio, the development of a new network protocol (TCP/IP), and the switch to TCP/IP to connect multiple networks. * Cerf describes his involvement with the ARPA network, and his relationships with Bolt Beranek and Newman, Robert Kahn, Lawrence Roberts, and the Network Working Group. * Baran describes his work at RAND, and discusses his interaction with the group at ARPA who were responsible for the later development of the ARPANET. * Kleinrock discusses his work on the ARPANET. * * Lukasik discusses his tenure at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the development of computer networks and the ARPANET. * Frank describes his work on the ARPANET, including his interaction with Roberts and the IPT Office.


Detailed technical reference works

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** NTIS documents may be available from * *


External links

* * * Timeline. * * Personal anecdote of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET * * * {{Authority control American inventions History of the Internet Computer-related introductions in 1969 Internet properties established in 1969 Internet properties disestablished in 1990 1969 establishments in the United States Internet in the United States 1990 disestablishments in the United States