Daily Vignette for 21 November -- ARPANET
On November 21st 1969, the first permanent ARPANET connection, between UCLA and SRI, was established.
ARPA was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an R&D shop run by the Defense department. It eventually became DARPA (where the D stands for Defense), and the ARPANET eventually grew into the Internet. The principal idea behind ARPANET was to have a packet switching network that connected widely separated computers so they could share files and data. They connected via 50 kbit/s modems.
As the ARPANET article over at Wikipedia tells us,Packet switching, today the dominant basis for data communications worldwide, was a new concept at the time of the conception of the ARPANET. Data communications had been based on the idea of circuit switching, as in the traditional telephone circuit, wherein a telephone call reserves a dedicated circuit for the duration of the communication session and communication is possible only between the two parties interconnected.
With packet switching, a data system could use one communications link to communicate with more than one machine by collecting data into datagrams and transmit these as packets onto the attached network link, whenever the link is not in use. Thus, not only could the link be shared, much as a single post box can be used to post letters to different destinations, but each packet could be routed independently of other packets.
You can read more about the ARPANET here.
ARPA was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an R&D shop run by the Defense department. It eventually became DARPA (where the D stands for Defense), and the ARPANET eventually grew into the Internet. The principal idea behind ARPANET was to have a packet switching network that connected widely separated computers so they could share files and data. They connected via 50 kbit/s modems.
As the ARPANET article over at Wikipedia tells us,Packet switching, today the dominant basis for data communications worldwide, was a new concept at the time of the conception of the ARPANET. Data communications had been based on the idea of circuit switching, as in the traditional telephone circuit, wherein a telephone call reserves a dedicated circuit for the duration of the communication session and communication is possible only between the two parties interconnected.
With packet switching, a data system could use one communications link to communicate with more than one machine by collecting data into datagrams and transmit these as packets onto the attached network link, whenever the link is not in use. Thus, not only could the link be shared, much as a single post box can be used to post letters to different destinations, but each packet could be routed independently of other packets.
You can read more about the ARPANET here.