What is the Army of Extreme Thinkers?

[Ivan Seeking]

" Over the past half-century, an obscure Pentagon group, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been behind some of the world's most revolutionary inventions -- the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth technology and the computer mouse, to name a few."

http://publicbroadcasting.net/wnyc/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=533827

 

[Zantra]

An electronic elephant? Good to know my tax dollars are being well spent.

 

[LURCH]

"An obscure Pentagon groupe", DARPA?

"What's this here 'Pen-T-Gone' they's a-yappin' 'bout?"

 

[Andy]

I understood it to be a British Scientist that created the internet, I may be wrong but I am pretty confident that he created the network so that he could communicate with other scientists across the country, and throughout the rest of the world

 

[mntlfngrs]

1957
The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite. In response,the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within theDepartment of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.
Backbones: None - Hosts: None
1962
RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.

Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.

"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."
Backbones: None - Hosts: None
1968
ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 4
1972
The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA)

ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.


Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 23
1973
Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 23+
1974
First Use of term Internet by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol.


Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET - Hosts: 23+
1976
Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allowed coaxial cable to move data extremely fast. This was a crucial component to the development of LANs.

The packet satellite project went into practical use. SATNET, Atlantic packet Satellite network, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe.Surprisingly, it used INTELSAT satellites that were owned by a consortium of countries and not exclusively the United States government.

UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.

The Department of Defense began to experiment with the TCP/IP protocol and soon decided to require it for use on ARPANET.


Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 111+
1979
USENET (the decentralized news group network) was created by Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at University of North Carolina, and programmers Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. It was based on UUCP.

The Creation of BITNET, by IBM, "Because its Time Network", introduced the "store and forward" network. It was used for email and listservs.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 111+
1981
National Science Foundation created backbone called CSNET 56 Kbps network for institutions without access to ARPANET. Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 213
1983
Internet Activities Board (IAB) was created in 1983.

On January 1st, every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP entirely.

The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS). This allowed packets to be directed to a domain name, which would be translated by the server database into the corresponding IP number. This made it much easier for people to access other servers, because they no longer had to remember numbers.


Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 562
1984
The ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks.

Upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines,1.5 Mbps which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide advanced routers and Merit would manage the network. New network was to be called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to remain called CSNET.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 1024
1985
The National Science Foundation began deploying its new T1 lines, which would be finished by 1988.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 1961
1986
The Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF was created to serve as a forum for technical coordination by contractors for DARPA working on ARPANET, US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway system.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 2308
1987
BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN), another work of the National Science Foundation.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 28,174
1988
Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again.
Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 56,000
1990

(Updated 8/2001) Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network & Services, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone.

While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.

Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community.
Backbones: 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 313,000

 

[Tsu]

Just off the top of your head, right?

What/who is BBN and who did Robert Metcalfe work for?

 

[Andy]

OK good point mntlfngrs, i have checked this and it is to be correct but I am sure i heard that it was a british scientist that created the internet.