The history of the Internet

The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of wide area networking that originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France.^[1] The U.S. Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s, including for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. The first message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969 from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock‘s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

Packet switching networks such as the NPL network, ARPANET, Merit Network, CYCLADES, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols.^[2] Donald Davies first demonstrated packet switching in 1967 at the National Physics Laboratory (NPL) in the UK, which became a testbed for UK research for almost two decades.^[3][4] The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. The design included concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin.