It has been 35 years since ARPANet was built. For those of you who are as awestruck as I am by major technology breakthroughs, here is an email from the man wqho managed the project back in the 1960's, Bob Taylor, clarifying what happened when. It is from a   mailing list distribution:

From: Bob Taylor
Date: October 6, 2004 2:45:03 AM EDT

Subject: [IP] more on 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well the start
of the Arpanet anyway djf)

Hello Dave.  I agree with you that Rick Adams was "right to the
point".  Here is some more ARPAnet history background.

In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project.  I was Director
of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late '65
to late '69.  There were only two people involved in the decision to
launch the ARPAnet:  my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld,
and me.

From 1962 to 1970, beginning with J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland,
and then me, IPTO funded several of the first projects devoted to the
creation of interactive computing -- then referred to as time-sharing. 
In '64 - '65, I witnessed that within each local site when users were
first connected by a time-sharing system, a community of people with
common interests began to discover one another and interact through the
medium of the computer.  I was struck by the fact that this was a
wonderfully new and powerful phenomenon. 

The next obvious step was to connect those sites with an interactive
network.  To me, computing was about communication, not arithmetic. 
Hence the ARPAnet.
This theme is elaborated in a paper Lick and I wrote in 1968 entitled,
"The Computer as a Communications Device".  Google can find it for
you.  On the last couple of pages there is a scenario that is
reminiscent of today's Internet.

Numerous untruths have been disseminated about events surrounding the
origins of the ARPAnet.  Here are some facts:
          The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by
considerations of war.  The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with
common interests to connect to one another through interactive
computing even when widely separated by geography.

          The singularly most important contribution to the
architectural design of the ARPAnet/Internet came from Wesley Clark: 
the interface message processor (IMP).  Wes is the designer of the LINC
which was arguably the first personal computer.  Wes' ARPAnet concept
ensured the critically valuable distributed architecture of the
ARPAnet.  Prior to Wes' contribution, Larry Roberts, whom I hired in
Dec '66 to be ARPAnet's program manager, was considering a single,
central ARPAnet control computer at a military base in Nebraska. 
Fortunately, Wes quickly disabused Roberts of this notion.


    The most significant role in actually building the ARPAnet was
played by Frank Heart and his Bolt, Beranek & Newman team:  Severo
Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Barker, Bernie Cosell, Dave Walden, and
Bob Kahn. 

    Two suspicious claims relating to the ARPAnet were an important
part of the case for awarding the 2001 Draper Prize to Kahn and
Kleinrock. 
     1. Kahn has claimed far and wide to be "responsible for the
systems design of the ARPAnet" while a member of the BB&N team.  Since no other team member agrees, I doubt the validity of this claim. 
    2.  Roberts and Kleinrock (close friends since college) began to
claim in 1995, more than 30 years after the fact, that Kleinrock
invented  packet switching.  Most of us believe that Donald Davies in
England and Paul Baran in the U.S. independently invented packet
switching in the early '60s.
I believe these two claims are false but they are recorded as facts on
the web sites of the National Academy of Engineering and the Computer
History Museum.  The worst property of self-promotion is that it takes
credit away from the people who actually made the contributions. 
Roberts, Kahn, and Kleinrock have, however, made other important
contributions.  These can only be tarnished by extravagant claims.

    Packet switching is an important part of modern networking, but it
is not the only key piece.  The multiplicity of the applications and
the openness of the standards also played critical roles in ARPAnet
development, as did Steve Crocker's initiation and management of the
RFC process.


          I believe the first internet was created at Xerox PARC, circa
'75, when we connected, via PUP, the Ethernet with the ARPAnet.  PUP
(PARC Universal Protocol) was instrumental later in defining TCP (ask
Metcalfe or Shoch, they were there). 

          For the internet to grow, it also needed a networked
personal computer, a graphical user interface with WYSIWYG properties,
modern word processing, and desktop publishing.  These, along with the
Ethernet, all came out of my lab at Xerox PARC in the '70s, and were
commercialized over the next 20 years by Adobe, Apple, Cisco,
Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that were necessary to the
development of the Internet.


        The ARPAnet was not an internet.  An internet is a connection
between two or more computer networks.  The ARPAnet, with help from
thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet.  Without the
ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a much longer time in coming.


rwt

---

DEFINITION:

Packet Switching:

Refers to protocols in which messages are divided into packets before they are sent. Each packet is then transmitted individually and can even follow different routes to its destination. Once all the packets forming a message arrive at the destination, they are recompiled into the original message.

Most modern Wide Area Network (WAN) protocols, including TCP/IP, X.25, and Frame Relay, are based on packet-switching technologies. In contrast, normal telephone service is based on a circuit-switching technology, in which a dedicated line is allocated for transmission between two parties