Dakota (cigarette)
“Gone in 1990, remembered longer.”
“The first network hung up so the whole world could log on.”
ARPANET was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control, and one of the first networks to run the TCP/IP protocol suite. Started in 1966 by Bob Taylor at ARPA to let remote computers share resources, with Larry Roberts as program manager and BBN building the Interface Message Processors, its first computers connected in 1969. It was less a product than a promise: the idea that machines, and t
By 1990, ARPANET was retired, its work quietly done. Its two great technologies — packet switching, drawing on Donald Davies and Paul Baran, and TCP/IP — became the technical foundation of the Internet. It didn't die so much as dissolve into everything that came after it, which is about the best send-off any network could ask for.
Spotted something wrong? Every fact on this page traces to a dated source. Fixes make the graveyard better for everyone.
“Gone in 1990, remembered longer.”
“It quadrupled memory capacity and quadrupled the future along with it.”
“First Mac to see in color — and it never stopped looking good.”