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So the following year the ARPANet,
which is now the Internet, started getting connected.
Almost a year and a half after it was planned they told
us – principal investigators doing ARPA work–
that they were going to try to tie our computers together
to experiment with networks for the other principal investigators
running their programs. They all had time-sharing computers
and were doing research. And their graduate students,
etc, would have to get involved helping make some funny
networking things work, and why.
So they both turned and started talking
to the ARPA command who were running this multiple research
program like that from the ARPA office. And they only
had a couple sectors. And everybody says, "You're going
to have to tell us what the resources are so we can use
it." But I was sitting there so thrilled because that
meant there was a ready-made community that would be tied
together with a network, that I could start doing the
kind of collective work I wanted to do. So I volunteered.
In 1969 when they started actually
connecting the network, there was an IMP, Interface Message
Processor, that, at every node in this network, relayed
things through. And at that time we only needed to have
it at the main center. So they were going to go out so
you could tie your computer to that and it would be in
communication. And so my computer was the second one tied
to the ARPANet. So you can ask yourself if you could be
connected to the Internet any earlier than that. I say,
no.
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