In October 1962, computers were giants, often the size of a house, each one an isolated island of data. But at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, a psychologist named J.C.R. Licklider had a different vision. He called it the 'Galactic Network.' In a series of memos to his colleagues, he described an 'electronic commons' where anyone on the globe could access programs and data from any location. At the time, this was pure science fiction. Computers used punch cards and processed tasks in isolated batches. But Licklider, newly appointed as head of ARPA's computer research office, now had the funding to turn his dream into a research project, aiming to build a world where humans and computers worked together as one interactive system.
The Internet Revolution
From a 1962 vision of a 'Galactic Network' to a connected world, this is the story of how the internet was built, one step at a time.
The Galactic Network
Frequently Asked Questions
Was the World Wide Web the same thing as the internet?
No. The internet is the global network of computers, while the World Wide Web is a system of linked documents that runs on top of the internet, accessed using browsers. Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989, long after the internet was established.
What was the very first message sent over the ARPANET?
The first message was 'LO'. In 1969, a student programmer at UCLA was trying to type 'LOGIN' to a remote computer at Stanford, but the system crashed after just two letters were transmitted.
Who paid for the early internet?
The early internet, known as ARPANET, was funded by the U.S. government through its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The National Science Foundation later managed the backbone until its decommissioning in 1995, when commercial providers took over.
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