An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1

In a very real sense, the Internet, this marvelous worldwide digital communications network that you’re using right now, was created because one man was annoyed at having too many computer terminals in his office.

The year was 1966. Robert Taylor was the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office. The agency was created in 1958 by President Eisenhower in response to the launch of Sputnik. So Taylor was in the Pentagon, a great place for acronyms like ARPA and IPTO. He had three massive terminals crammed into a room next to his office. Each one was connected to a different mainframe computer. They all worked slightly differently, and it was frustrating to remember multiple procedures to log in and retrieve information.

Author’s re-creation of Bob Taylor’s office with three teletypes.
Credit:
Rama & Musée Bolo (Wikipedia/Creative Commons), steve lodefink (Wikipedia/Creative Commons), The Computer Museum @ System Source

In those days, computers took up entire rooms, and users accessed them through teletype terminals—electric typewriters hooked up to either a serial cable or a modem and a phone line. ARPA was funding multiple research projects across the United States, but users of these different systems had no way to share their resources with each other. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a network that connected all these computers?

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