Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) Net
The first version
of an IP based network was funded by the US Department of Defence in 1969 as
a means of communicating with defence contractors and universities doing military
research. Robustness was provided over the imperfect network by packet switching
technology, developed by another DoD engineer Paul Baran, as a means of ensuring
failure resistant communications. The myth still persists that the Arpanet was
invented to make a nuclear counter strike possible amid post-apocalyptic devastation.
However, this has more to do with retrospective fantasies about the Cold War
than with the reality of internet history. The illustration is part of one of
the first skethches of the network architecture, showing one host and one node,
from September 1969.
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