In a very real sense, this wonderful global digital communication network that you now use became on the internet, because one man was irritated because he had too many computer terminals in his office.
The year was 1966. Robert Taylor was director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The office was founded in 1958 by President Eisenhower in response to the launch of Sputnik. So Taylor was in the Pentagon, a great place for acronyms such as Arpa and Ipto. He had crammed three massive terminals in a room next to his office. Each was connected to a different mainframe computer. They all worked something else and it was frustrating to remember multiple procedures to log in and pick up information.
The recreation of the author of the Bob Taylor office with three teletypes. Credit: Rama & Musée Bolo (Wikipedia/Creative Commons), Steve Lodefink (Wikipedia/Creative Commons), The Computer Museum @ System Bron
In those days, computers seized entire rooms and users opened them via Teletype terminals – electric typewriters connected to a serial cable or a modem and a telephone line. Arpa financed several research projects in the United States, but users of these different systems had no way to share their resources with each other. Wouldn't it be great if there was a network that connected all these computers?
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