History of ARPANET

This is my last posting from my multi-genre research paper. This one is about ARPANET, which was the start of the internet. All feedback welcome.

History of the ARPANET

By

Ryan Holzapfel

ARPANET, created by the U.S Department of Defense’s ARPA, was a first attempt at long distance networking. It was first set up in the west coast, but later had nodes through out the United States.

ARPA had not been in existence very long before ARPANET, one of its first projects came along. The idea for ARPA was sparked by Soviet advancements in technology, such as Sputnik (Abbate, p.8). The main goals of Arpanet were to share information between computer centers, and to shorten the technology advancement gap between the U.S. and the Soviets. The 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, really brought these fears to life in the American public. (Abbate,9)

The first data exchange was between UCLA and Stanford. UCLA was to log in to the Stanford computer. The phrase used to log in was “log win”. UCLA’s Honeywell DDP 516 computer crashed at the letter “g”. Stanford had a SDS-940 computer (Bellis,1). The connection was a telephone line leased from Western Union. (Abbate,9)

In 1970, Vinton Cerf joined the ARPANET project. That same year, he and his colleagues at ARPANET developed and implemented TCP/IP. TCP/IP is a controlling protocol. It splits the information into packets and sends them to their destination. By 1971 there were 15 nodes to ARPANET: Stanford Research Institution, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, RAND, SDC, University of Utah, MIT, BBN, Harvard, and Burroughs.

By 1986, NSF, the National Science Foundation, wanted to start a network similar to ARPANET, and in 1988, ARPANET nodes started transferring their connections to the NSFNET main frame. ARPANET was fully and formally decommissioned in 1990. Some consider ARPANET the beginning of the internet we know today.