By:temp ============================================================================================= The world's first operational packet switching network was the ARPANET, which first went online in 1968. The program which produced the ARPANET (initiated by J. C. R. Licklider and developed by Wesley Clark, Leonard Kleinrock, Larry Roberts, Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor) had already conceived most of the basic ideas of what such a network would look like to its users; today's Internet is not much more than a better-engineered and very wide-spread (much more so than perhaps even those visionary pioneers foresaw) implementation of those ideas. The Internet's roots lie within the ARPANET, which not only was the intellectual forerunner of the Internet, but was also initially the core network in the collection of networks in the Internet; it was also an important tool in developing the Internet (being used for communication between the groups working on internetworking research). Kahn recruited Vint Cerf of the University of California, Los Angeles to work with him on the problem. They soon worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible. Cerf credits Herbert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin (designer of the CYCLADES network) with important influences on this design. Some accounts also credit the early networking work at Xerox PARC as an important technical influence. With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join almost any networks together, no matter what their characteristics were, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. (One popular saying has it that TCP/IP, the eventual product of Cerf and Kahn's work, will run over "two tin cans and a string".) A computer called a gateway (later changed to router to avoid confusion with other types of gateway) is provided with an interface to each network, and forwards packets back and forth between them. Happily, this new concept was a perfect fit with the newly emerging local area networks, which were revolutionizing communication between computers within a single site. ============================================================================================= Article Source: http://www.dailynewarticles.com Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. More Articles from History Category: Back to The Future With Germany Discover the USMC Challenge Coin Chavez's Inspiration - Simon Bolivar The Story of the Guillotine The Building of the Pentagon History of Internet Explorer Conflict in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) PART I Thousands of Failures, but Thousands of Patents How The Chinese Communist Party Exerts and Maintains Control Argentina's Economy in a Nutshell Human-made Monsters Another Look at Indians (Native Americans, Amerindians) The Uganda Scheme The First Serial Killer - Ed Gein The American Revolution