In 1966 Roberts joined ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to build a big computer network using packet switching – the ARPANET. In 1968 the ideas were refined to the point where actual equipment was needed and BBN, Bolt, Beranek and Newman, were brought in to design the packet switches – the Interface Message Processors or IMPs.

An IMP - an early router!

The IMPs were small computers in their own right and were to be added to existing mainframe machines to create the network. The first IMP was installed at UCLA in Kleinrock’s lab and on October 29 1969 an ARPANET communication was first established  this node and one at Douglas Engelbart's lab at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). By December 5, 1969, the initial 4-node network also encompassing the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah was connected. This was the start of what was to become the Internet.

From small acorns …

1972 was the start of the second phase of the Internet and at this pont ARPAnet grew from four machines in 1969 to 40 in 1972.

In October 1972 Bob Kahn organized the first public demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). But perhaps more importantly this was the year that the first email was sent. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. A year later the first international connections to the ARPANET were added, to the UK and Norway.

The problem was that the ARPANET wasn’t yet the Internet we know and love. The interconnections didn’t really have the flexibility needed to allow networks to be connected together- i.e. to be an “inter”-net. It was more like a large Wide area network that machines, rather than their local networks could connect to.

The man who first realised the need for an “open architecture” was Bob Kahn of BBN. Each network would look after its own internal workings and black boxes called “gateways” would deal with passing packets between the networks. There would be no global control or error recovery provided by the gateways.

At the start of 1973 Kahn asked Vinton Cerf, a researcher at Stanford, to work with him on the detailed design of a protocol. Cerf had been involved in the design of the initial ARPANET’s original protocol. What they created and issued as a specification in 1974 we now call TCP/IP.

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