It was mid-1971. Ten scientists met at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Tech Square in Cambridge. They had been given a task by the director of the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office. The moment had arrived, Larry Roberts told the group’s leaders, to publicly demonstrate IPTO’s crowning achievement: the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, forerunner of the Internet.
The ARPA Network, “was virtually unknown everywhere but the inner sancta of the computer research community,” write Internet historians Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon in their engaging book Where Wizards Stay Up Late. “Roberts knew it was time for a public demonstration.” via ars technica
October 18, 2011
