“In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET.
And the ARPANET was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the deep.
And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, ‘Let there be a protocol,’ and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more protocols,’ and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more networks,’ and it was so.”
— Danny Cohen
This Internet Timeline begins in 1962, before the word ‘Internet’ is invented. The world’s 10,000 computers are primitive, although they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have only a few thousand words of magnetic core memory, and programming them is far from easy.
Domestically, data communication over the phone lines is an AT&T monopoly. The ‘Picturephone’ of 1939, shown again at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, is still AT&T’s answer to the future of worldwide communications.
But the four-year old Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, a future-oriented funder of ‘high-risk, high-gain’ research, lays the groundwork for what becomes the ARPANET and, much later, the Internet.
By 1992, when this timeline ends,
the Internet has one million hosts
the ARPANET has ceased to exist
computers are nine orders of magnitude faster
network bandwidth is twenty million times greater.
Don't know about 1939, but by the 60's and 70's, Picturephone was just the right fit. AT&T had control of dial network and the wire. PP allowed for xmit and rec of images and voice over three twisted pair through the dial network. Of course that all changed 1/1/84.
Awesome. And we were here. We were here when there was nothing and here for the beginning. No, not just here, we participated in its birth and guided its infancy. Do we know what have we done? Do we understand what we’ve created? What will we do when it becomes aware? If this shall be created in our own image, perhaps we should be afraid...very afraid.