In 1969, Arpa had built a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country.

Photograph: Courtesy of the Alpine Inn Beer Garden, formerly Rossotti'sĪs a military venture, Arpa had a specifically military motivation for creating the internet: it offered a way to bring computing to the front lines. Without Arpa, the internet wouldn’t exist.Īn old image of Rossotti’s, one of the birthplaces of the internet. But the mothership was the US defense department’s lavishly funded research arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) – which later changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – and its many contractors. They worked at places as varied as the French government-sponsored computer network Cyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, the University of Hawaii and Xerox. The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. And that simplicity is the key to its success. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. This feature of the internet makes it seem extremely complex. The internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and email, but its essence is always elsewhere. It’s everywhere, but we only see it in glimpses. You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle. It’s easy to picture Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is easy to visualize. T he internet is so vast and formless that it’s hard to imagine it being invented. Over plastic cups of beer, they proved that a strange idea called the internet could work. But 40 years ago this August, a small team of scientists set up a computer terminal at one of its picnic tables and conducted an extraordinary experiment. It doesn’t seem a likely spot for a major act of innovation.

The message 1976 youtube