ARPANET : The Ancestor of Internet

ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP. The development of ARPANET marked the beginning of the digital communication era and made the foundation for today's global internet.

Initialization

ARPANET was funded by the United States Department of Defense through its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created during the Cold War with Soviet. Its goal was to secure the US military's command and control systems and to connect computers at Pentagon-funded research institutions.

Development

Initial Concept:

The original concept of ARPANET was to build a network that would allow researchers at various locations to share resources and communicate with each other efficiently.

Packet Switching:

Rather than using traditional circuit-switching used in phone lines, ARPANET was the first network to use packet-switching technology, where data was split into packets, sent to the destination and reassembled.

Interface Message Processors:

Computers were connected to ARPANET using these dedicated minicomputers, which acted as routers today.

Evolution

First Nodes:

The very first ARPANET connection was made between University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1969. Later, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were added to complete the initial four-node network.

Network Growth:

By the 1970s, the network had expanded to include several universities and research institutions. ARPANET was used by researchers, for collaboration and sharing resources.

TCP/IP:

The introduction of the TCP/IP protocol suite in 1983 was essential for ARPANET as it allowed different kinds of networks to interconnect, which is a fundamental aspect of today's Internet. The adoption of TCP/IP was often marked as the birth of the modern Internet.

ARPANET's lasting legacy is more than technological. It changed the way people thought about communication and laid the groundwork for the connected world we live in now. The protocols and networking techniques developed on ARPANET became the essential building blocks of the commercial internet we use today. It fostered a community of researchers who contributed to the early standards of networking and promoted a culture of sharing information openly, which remains as a fundamental principle of internas.

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