ARPANET | 1960essay

ARPANET, What Is That?

I sit and wonder where the internet started. The internet is far and wide, bigger than anything else in the world. The internet has only been around for twenty-six to thirty-three years. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network known as the ARPANET was the first network to implement the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP). Both of these things is what founded the Internet. Without the ARPANET would we still have the internet today and would it be as advanced as it is? Many scientists contributed to inventing the internet for what it is today, connecting people, creating a learning environment, and now more than ever a way of entertainment.

When the ARPANET was being created technology wasn’t too advance. So it took many computer scientists to even create a single node that connected to another node. When looking at articles that talk about the ARPANET being connected to another node with a telephone wire with a speed of 50 kbps, we look at that today as being very slow. The measure of speed is determined by how many bytes of memory are being transferred per second. 50 kilobits a second is a very small amount compared to what we can reach today of 1.125 terabits per second (in lab conditions only). The internet speeds have levels of speed with kilobytes being first, then 1000kb equaling 1 megabit; 1000mb equaling 1 gigabit; 1000gb equaling 1 terabit. The ARPANET grew with more and more knowledge being created between new companies gaining access to the service. “In July, 1975, DARPA transferred management and operation of the ARPANET to the Defense Communications Agency, now DISA. The NSFNET then assumed management of the non-military side of the network during its first period of very rapid growth, including connection to networks like the CSNET and EUnet, and the subsequent evolution into the Internet we know today” (Stewart par. 10). DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) done lots of research that provided much of the secure protocols that made the ARPANET. After having the Defense side of ARPANET there was a non-military side created that was known as the NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network) that was managed by the National Science Foundation. The non-military side was used to promote educational communications between well-known schools like UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, and the University of Utah. All these schools had a computer that connected to the network in the southwestern region of the United States. The CSNET (Computer Science Network) and EUnet (European Unix Network) were just other network connections that came about after further advances in the NSFNET. The EUnet was an international connection based in Europe that provided access to the network in the main-land.

The World Wide Web is what was later on developed by a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee. Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web because it was what actually linked the websites together by hyperlinks and other URL addresses. If this type of formatted resource was available earlier, it could have assisted in the progress of making the ARPANET more advanced so the universities and military would’ve had more resources to use at that time. At the beginning the ARPANET was a big communications tool to send messages to one another more privately. “However, it soon became clear that one of the main features of Arpanet was its use for electronic mail (e-mail)” (Trueman par. 2). Email has helped by allowing us to simply send a message between one another or multiple people at a time. All of this is due to the ARPANET system that originally connected two computers by a telephone wire provided by the AT&T company as said “At about 10:30 PM on October 29'th, 1969, the connection was established over a 50 kbps line provided by the AT&T telephone company, and a two node ARPANET was born” (Stewart par. 7). AT&T was one of the first companies to assist in the progress that still widely exist today. Also taking into mind that telephonic communications weren’t as advanced as they’re today as well.

ARPANET was the firm foundation at what the internet was going to become. Many scientists realized to what extent the ARPANET could potentially reach. The internet has made such a drastic change from what it was 15 years ago much less 47 years ago when ARPANET was founded. ARPANET was intentionally meant for educational and military base communications, but now it has reached far beyond that. Without the ARPANET the internet-era would still be longing for existence. These scientists in my opinion deserve Nobel Peace prizes for all the work they put into the ARPANET and what’s made this day in age so successful in terms of using all the services of the internet.

Works Cited

Stewart, William. “ARPANET – The First Internet” Living Internet. 2015, http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_arpanet.htm. Accessed 15 Nov 2016

Trueman, C N. “The Internet” The History Learning Site. 17 Mar 2015, historylearningsite.co.uk. Accessed 16 Nov 2016