How America Got Online

It’s hard to remember a time before the internet, for most of us its hard to remember a time before high-speed internet, but despite what many of us may thing, the internet did not begin with the now primitive seeming dial-up connections and AOL 2.0 of the early 90’s.
The true origins of the internet can be traced back to 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. Throughout the late 1950’s, the Soviet Union launched several artificial satellites, known as the Sputnik program, and their success coupled with their surprise launchings had the U.S. scrambling to regain it’s technological lead.
Within a year of the first Sputnik launch and as a direct result of it, the United States made a series of initiatives, many made by the Department of Defense, to re-claim technological superiority. One of those initiatives was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider of MIT came to head the advancement of ARPA and first developed the theory of a network of computers that could be used to share information for military and scientific purposes. Licklider was the first to champion the idea of networking and had a concept very similar to the internet we know today. Licklider found much help with bringing his concept to fruition in Leonard Kleinrock at MIT. Kleinrock had published papers regarding packet switching being used for communication as opposed to circuits. This idea, along with Lawrence G. Roberts, also of MIT, and his connection of the first two computers with a low speed dial-up telephone line were huge leaps on the road to computer networking. With Robert’s creation of the first wide-area computer network, the need for packet switching, Kleinrock’s idea, was confirmed.
When Roberts joined ARPA in 1966, he worked on better developing his theory of a computer network, and coined his plan ARPANET. Two years later, in 1968, when plans for ARPANET had been thoroughly designed, UCLA was selected to be the first node on ARPANET. In 1969, with Stanford Research Institute (SRI) providing the second node, the first host-to-host message was sent from UCLA to SRI. Within the year, four host computers were connected to ARPANET, and the predecessor to the internet we now know was born.