Week 3: Clear ARPANET

Before the creation of the internet, there was the ARPANET. ARPA or Advanced Research Projects Agency developed the first computer network for the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969. This network had four servers. There were two servers located at different University of California campuses and the other two were located at the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute.

Since ARPA developed top secret systems and weapons for the U.S. military during the Cold War many thought that the ARPANET was created as some sort of military intelligence or defense, but former director of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld, denies that it was created for that purpose. Herzfeld stated, “it (ARPANET) came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country and that many research investigators who should have access were geographically separated from them.”

There were many innovations to computer networking under the first network, ARPANET. Some of the more important innovations were e-mail, file transfer protocol (FTP), and telnet.

ARPANET was finally shut down in 1990 because it had become old and outdated technology to the new LANs (local area networks). At first LANs connected to the ARPANET but in 1986 NSFnet branched out from the ARPANET and formed its own network on its own supercomputer servers. This began the trend of the local area networks branching away from the ARPANET.