Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, a pioneer packet-switched network that was built in the early 1970s under contract to the US Government, led to the development of today’s Internet, and was decommissioned in June 1990.
| ARPANET | |
|---|---|
 ARPANET logical map, March 1977 | |
| Type | Data |
| Location | United States |
| Protocols | 1822 protocol, NCP, TCP/IP |
| Operator | From 1975, Defense Communications Agency |
| Established | 1969 |
| Closed | 1990 |
| Commercial? | No |
| Funding | From 1966, Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) |
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switching network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable access to remote computers. Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the network design. He incorporated Donald Davies’ concepts and designs for packet switching, and sought input from Paul Baran. ARPA awarded the contract to build the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman who developed the first protocol for the network. Roberts engaged Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA to develop mathematical methods for analyzing the packet network technology.
The first computers were connected in 1969 and the Network Control Program was implemented in 1970. Further software development enabled remote login, file transfer and email. The network expanded rapidly and was declared operational in 1975 when control passed to the Defense Communications Agency.
Internetworking research in the early 1970s by Bob Kahn at DARPA and Vint Cerf at Stanford University and later DARPA led to the formulation of the Transmission Control Program, which incorporated concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin. As this work progressed, a protocol was developed by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Version 4 of TCP/IP was installed in the ARPANET for production use in January 1983 after the Department of Defense made it standard for all military computer networking.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In the early 1980s, the NSF funded the establishment of national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided network access and network interconnectivity with the NSFNET project in 1986. The ARPANET was formally decommissioned in 1990, after partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry had assured private sector expansion and future commercialization of an expanded world-wide network, known as the Internet.
