The ARPANET

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". Started by the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA), the entire network consisted of just four computers linked together from different sites to conduct research in wide-area networking.

SRI, then known as the Stanford Research Institute, hosted one of the original four network nodes, along with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah. The very first transmission on the ARPANET, on October 29, 1969, was from UCLA to SRI.

In those days, the ARPANET looked like this:

By 1972, the ARPANET was comprised of 37 computers. In 1983, the ARPANET was opened up to universities and various scientific bodies. In the years since then, this small network has grown into the Internet we know today.

For more information about the ARPANET, visit The Computer Museum History Center.

On October 29, 2009, SRI celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first ARPANET connection.