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Tech · died 1990

ARPANET

???? — 1990
retired Reported · 1990

“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.

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