BBN fixed their timing trouble, air shipped the IMP, and it arrived on our loading dock on Saturday, August 30. They arrived with the IMP, wheeled it

ARPANET – The First Internet

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2021-07-16 22:30:06

BBN fixed their timing trouble, air shipped the IMP, and it arrived on our loading dock on Saturday, August 30. They arrived with the IMP, wheeled it into our computer room, plugged it in and the software restarted from where it had been when the plug was pulled in Cambridge. Still Saturday, August 30. Panic time at UCLA.

The ARPANET was the first wide area packet switching network, the “Eve” network of what has evolved into the Internet we know and love today.

The ARPANET was originally created by the IPTO under the sponsorship of DARPA, and conceived and planned by Lick Licklider, Lawrence Roberts, and others as described earlier in this section.

The ARPANET, and so the internet, was born on August 30, 1969, when BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to Leonard Kleinrock‘s Network Measurements Center at UCLA. This was long before commercial internet providers came onto the scene, however. The IMP was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, designed to handle the ARPANET network interface. In a famous piece of Internet lore, on the side of the crate, a hardware designer at BBN named Ben Barker had written “Do it to it, Truett”, in tribute to the BBN engineer Truett Thach who traveled with the computer to UCLA on the plane.

The UCLA team responsible for installing the IMP and creating the first ARPANET node included graduate students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield. Wingfield had built the hardware interface between the UCLA computer and the IMP, the machines were connected, and within a couple of days of delivery the IMP was communicating with the local NMC host, an SDS Sigma 7 computer running the SEX operating system. Messages were successfully exchanged, and the one computer ARPANET was born. A picture of Leonard Kleinrock with the first ARPANET IMP is shown below (click on the picture to link to a larger image on Kleinrock’s home site).

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