1969
ARPANET
Scan of ARPANET logic map, circa 1969
The Internet as you know it today, and through which you are accessing this information, had its beginnings in the late 1960s as the “ARPANET”. The project was started by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, then called ARPA and now DARPA. The initial network of only four computers at different locations conducted research in wide-area networking.
SRI hosted one of the four original network nodes, along with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah. The very first transmission on the ARPANET, on October 29, 1969, was the logon from UCLA to SRI. By 1972, the ARPANET comprised 37 computers.
In 2009, the IEEE commemorated this achievement with a milestone plaque—one of four given to SRI to date. (Other plaques have been given to SRI for its work on the Liquid Crystal Display, the TIROS 1 Weather Satellite, and Color Television.)
