Author:  Terry Crawford

September 24, 2006

     In the late 1950s, the Department of Defense became concerned about the nation's communications systems in the event of an atomic war.

     In 1962, Paul Baran proposed a nationwide system of computers connected together using a decentralized network so that if one (1) or more major nodes were destroyed, the rest could dynamically adjust their connections to maintain communications.  This was viewed as an excellent idea.

     This proposal was discussed, developed, and expanded by the computing community and in 1969, the first network was funded by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPAnet, as it was called, linked four (4) major research facilities together: The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah. By 1971, ARPAnet had grown to 15 nodes and by 1972 there were 40. It was at this point that there was a need to establish common protocols for the rapidly growing system, so the InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) was created.

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