ARPANET (The Precursor of CYBERSPACE)

ARPANet is the WAN (Wide Area Network) network that forms the basis of the internet today. It was originally created by IPTO under the sponsorship of DARPA and conceived and planed mainly by Dr Joseph Carl Robnet Licklider and Lawrence Gilman Roberts.

IPTO = Information Processing Techniques Office formerly called Command and Control Research in the US of A. IPTO had a mission, which is and in quote;

To create a new generation of computational and information systems that posses capabilities far beyond those of current systems. These cognitive systems that know what they are doing:

Will be able to reason using substantial amount of appropriately represented knowledge.
Will learn from their experiences and improve their performance over time.
Will be capable of explaining themselves and taking naturally expressed direction from humans.
Will be aware of themselves and able to reflect on their own behavior.
Will be able to respond robustly to surprises, in a very general way.” end of quote.

The ARPANET was started in 1962 in response to the soviet union’s launch of Sputnik (a Russian unmanned space satellite) in 1957. ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency)hired Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider to head it. His idea for the project was the “Spirit of Community” and was interested in having computers help people communicate with other people.

The ARPANET went into labor on August 30 1969, when BBN(Bolt Beranek Newman Technologies founded in 1948 now; Raytheone BBN Technologies ) delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to Leonard Kleinrock’s network Measurements Center at UCLA. Professor Leonard Kleinrock focused his work on “understanding queuing theory” or studying how to record and measure events as the network worked. By the end of 1969, ARPANET was able to connect to four locations UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, SRI, and Utah.

arpanet_interface_message_process — This is the IMP that helped made the work of ARPA a success.

This was developed under the direction of the Advanced Research Agency (ARPA). In 1969 the project became a modest reality after the interconnection of 4 universities computers. The original idea was to enable the sharing of resources among mainly scientific users at the connected institutions.

Testing the ARPANet
At the UCLA end, they typed in the ‘l’ and asked SRI if they received it; ‘got the l’ came the voice reply. UCLA typed in the ‘o’, asked if they got it, and received ‘got the o’. UCLA then typed in the ‘g’ and the darned system CRASHED! Quite a beginning. On the second attempt, it worked fine!
– Leonard Kleinrock, The Birth of the Internet -.

The first message was sent by Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to second network node at Standford Research Institute (SRI).

Password protection Of ARPANET

The Purdy Polynomial hash algorithm was developed for ARPANET to protect passwords in 1971 at the request of Larry Roberts, head of ARPA at that time. It computed a polynomial of degree 2 24 + 17 modulo the 64-bit prime p = 264 – 59. The algorithm was later used by DEC to hash passwords in their OpenVMS operating system, and is still being used for this purpose as at the time of this post.The first message was sent by Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to second network node at Standford Research Institute (SRI) .The project took advantage of the new idea of sending information in small units called packets that could be routed on different paths and reconstructed at their destination. The development of the tcp/ip protocols in the 1970s made this possible to expand the size of the network which now had become a network of networks (ie. INTERNET).

The Government issued an etiquette to govern the use of ARPANet. Guess to ensure discipline.

Etiquette of ARPANET

“It is considered illegal to use the ARPANet for anything which is not in direct support of Government business … personal messages to other ARPANet subscribers (for example, to arrange a get-together or check and say a friendly hello) are generally not considered harmful … Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the Government agencies which manage the ARPANet.”
ARPANet

In the 1980, ARPANET was handed over to a separate military network called the Defence Data Network and NSFNet a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation of the USA. In 1995 NSFNet in turn began a phased withdrawal to turn the backbone of the vBNS(INTERNET) over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers (PSINet, UUNET, ANS/AOL, Sprint, MCL and AGIS-Net99).

Because ARPA’s name was changed to DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY (DARPA) in March 1972 which then got renamed to ARPA in February 1993 and then renamed back to DARPA in March 1996, ARPANET is sometimes refers to as DARPANET.

So this is where "We" begun.

Coldfusion has released a documentary on “The Secret Behind how the Internet Works” this documentary provides extra information on this topic. View below, hope it adds to your knowledge.