Arpanet :: essays research papers

The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In the late 1960's the U.S. military was desperately afraid of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. The United States formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense to establish a bombproof network to connect military bases. ARPANET's physical network was established in 1969 to enable universities and research organizations to exchange information freely. The first two nodes that formed the ARPANET were UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, shortly after the University of Utah was added to ARPANET. The Network Control Protocol (NCP) was initially used as the ARPANET protocol, beginning in 1970. By 1971, a total of 23 hosts at 15 locations were connected to the ARPANET. The following year, the first international connections occurred, linking the University College of London (UK) and the Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) to the ARPANET. The way ARPANET was set up is so that if one of the network links became disrupted by enemy attack, the traffic on it could automatically be rerouted to other links. Fortunately, the Net rarely has come under enemy attack. In the 1970s, ARPA also sponsored further research into the applications of packet switching technologies. This included extending packet switching to ships at sea and ground mobile units and the use of radio for packet switching. Ethernet was created during the course of research into the use of radio for packet switching, and it was found that coaxial cable could support the movement of data at extremely fast rates of speed. The development of Ethernet was crucial to the growth of local area computer networks. The success of ARPANET made it difficult to manage, particularly with the large and growing number of university sites on it. So it was broken into two parts. The two parts consisted of MILNET, which had the military sites, and the new, smaller ARPANET, which had the nonmilitary sites. On January 1,1983, every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP (old ARPANET language) completely. Thanks to TCP/IP MILNET and ARPANET remained connected through a technical scheme called IP (Internet Protocol); which enables traffic to be routed from one network to another as necessary. All the networks connected to the Internet speak IP, so they all can exchange messages. Although there were only two networks at that time, IP was designed to allow for tens of thousands of networks. An unusual fact about the IP design is that every computer on an IP network is just as capable as any other, so any