Where Did The Internet Originate
Because of ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, everybody seemed to have negative views about the US army. Many said they love to hate Pentagon. Despite all the bad things they had done so far, we all have got one big reason to love the ‘G-men’ – The Internet. The Internet originated inside the walls of Pentagon. Surprised? Well, we truly understand your current state of mind but this is just the tip of the ice berg as the full story is rather more surprising and more interesting.
The Cold War
The story begins with the Cold War when US department of Defense (DoD) started wondering if they could get a better command-and-control system to replace the old one? So, Pentagon assigned a task to RAND to come up with a possible solution for a military network which could survive a nuclear attack. One of the employees of RAND, Paul Baran, proposed a solution which was utilizing the packet switching for data transmission. Pentagon approved his idea and a contract was awarded to AT&T to implement the network but AT&T killed Baran’s idea by claiming that it is impossible to build.
Launch of Sputnik led to the foundation of ARPA
In 1957, US were beaten by Soviet Union when she launched the first artificial satellite Sputnik. The US president immediately resolved the research grants of Pentagon and founded an independent research organization ARPA which was assigned the task to start research projects for the progress of US Army. Larry Roberts, the then director of ARPA, focused on finding a solution for a better command-and-control system and gathered the research students at the platform of ARPA. One of the researchers, Wesley Clark, proposed a solution which consisted of a network in which each router was connected to its own host. After much skepticism, Roberts approved the idea of Wesley and awarded a contract to BBN to implement the design. BBN formed network of four computers and named it ARPANET.
ARPANET grew, more networks came on the scene, and soon the entire US was being covered by these networks. But these networks could not be interconnected as each had technical differences with the other. So, ARPA hired Vint Cerf to find a solution. Vint Cerf together with Bob Kahn invented TCP/IP which connected all the networks by hiding their differences. TCP/IP made possible the internetworking of different networks.
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