ARPANET

Note: a better description of ARPANET is currently available at History of the Internet.

The global Internet's progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the U.S. DoD. This is an important fact to remember, because the support and style of management by ARPA was crucial to the success of ARPANET. As the Internet develops and the struggle over the role the Internet plays unfolds, it will be important to remember how the network developed and the culture that it was connected with. (As a facilitator of communication, the culture of the Net is an important feature to acknowledge.) The ARPANET Completion Report, as published jointly by BBN of Cambridge, Mass., and ARPA concludes by stating:

"...it is somewhat fitting to end on the note that the ARPANET program has had a strong and direct feedback into the support and strength of computer science, from which the network itself sprung." (Chapter III, pg.132, Section 2.3.4)

In order to understand the wonder that the Internet, and various parts of the Net, represent, we need to understand why the ARPANET Completion report ends with the suggestion that the ARPANET is fundamentally connected to and born of computer science