Week 1

            The history of the Internet can be difficult to follow. With words like hypertext, TELNET, Xanadu and MOSAIC one may become lost in the jargon. The idea for a communication network began during the Cold War after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite. President Dwight D. Eisenhower “saw the need for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)” (Gromov). This agency will later lay the foundation for what the Internet is today. After launching an American satellite within 18 months of the agency’s creation, ARPA “began to focus on computer networking and communications technology” (Gromov).

            The original goal of ARPA was to make computers more interactive. To achieve this goal the agency began to give contracts to universities. This move provided the world with the first application of a communication network. Four universities, UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were connected through their computer systems. Kleinrock, “a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data” (Gromov). The UCLA team contacted the Stanford team to confirm the data retrieval. The data was simple; “login” was the only attempted word to be sent. Stanford received two letters before the system crashed, but those two letters marked the beginning of a new era and ARPAnet.

            ARPAnet is the networking of all ARPA funded computer systems. To show the public the new discovery of connected and interactive computers, ARPA held a demo at the Washington Hilton Hotel. The demo proved to be a huge success. A text based Star Trek game “where you used photon torpedos and phasers to blast Klingons” (Gromov) was created at one demo. Networking rapidly advanced as technology improved. Today we use the same basic networking that ARPA created on a global scale. The information has advanced from simple words to pictures, videos, games and much more.