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Heroes
of the Internet
When you talk about the key figures in the history of
the Internet, a number of ‘big’ names immediately
come to mind. But let’s begin at the beginning.
One of the key people in the early days of the Internet
was Dr. J. C. R. Licklider, who joined the Advanced
Research Project Agency (ARPA) within the US Department
of Defence in October 1962. He thought of interconnecting
computers in terms of interconnecting communities, and
worked to conceive the first ‘intergalactic network’
of computers. It was his vision that formed the beginning
of the ARPANET, a vision that was actively pursued by
MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts. Bob
Taylor was appointed as head of the Information Processing
Techniques Office (IPTO) in ARPA and in 1966 obtained
the funding to set up the first network.
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Larry
Roberts explodes the myth that the Internet was
created for communication in the event of a nuclear
war. |
But possibly
one of the most influential people in the formation
of the Internet was Donald
Davies who worked on the idea of breaking data up
into ‘packets’ and sending each packet separately
over a distributed network. Unbeknownst to him, Paul
Baran came up with a similar idea at around the
same time. If a whole company could be placed in a hall
of fame, then for the origins of the Internet, that
company would be BBN, who not only created the first
networked computers, but also employed Ray Tomlinson,
who created e-mail. Robert Kahn from BBN and Vint Cerf
from Stanford University developed what was to become
TCP/IP, the protocol that allows networks to communicate
with each other.
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Vint
Cerf recalls the origins of the ARPA Inter-Net project. |
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