Steve Crocker is chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. In the late 1960s, he was a UCLA graduate student who helped create the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet.

During the early and mid 1960s – about a half a century ago – computers were physically very big. Only big companies, universities and governments had computers, storing them in special air-conditioned rooms. And they were expensive. On IBM’s flagship mainframe computer, the IBM 7094, the memory unit – what you would now call the RAM – held one megabit, i.e. about 128KB, and cost about one million dollars in the early 1960s. That’s about five million dollars in today’s terms. Each computer was also the center of its own universe. There were a few experiments and special projects to connect computers together, but nothing common or easy.

Here’s how the government changed all of that.
via TechPresident

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