Fifty Years of the Internet Technology

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The National Museum of Computing

An Internetwork became an Internet which eventually became The Internet.

Fifty Years of the Internet TechnologyThe data network at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) came into operation in January 1970. It was the culmination of five years of theoretical research, design and development, and was one of the first packet-switching data communication networks in the world. (It would have been the first, but was just pipped at the post by the ARPAnet. Typical of this country, we gave the idea to the Americans then let them pick up and run with it!)Roger Scantlebury &amp; Brian Aldous tell the story of Donald Davies, superintendent of the Computer Science Division at NPL in 1965, realising that the existing public telephone network was not suitable for data communication and developing the idea of a network of switching centres based on mini-computers, interconnected by high bit-rate links. He suggested the concept of small ‘packets’ of data to be transmitted and reassembled at the recipients terminal. Davies’s idea was taken up by ARPA and incorporated in the ARPAnet, going live in three centres in 1969.Meanwhile, NPL built its network which went live in January 1970.During the 1970s, collaboration between experimental networks around the world led to an inter-network working group. The need for a universal protocol to allow computers on these networks to communicate became clear - an Internetwork of computers.The Internetwork became an internet which eventually became The Internet.The rest is history, as they say.

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Fifty Years of the Internet Technology

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Fifty Years of the Internet Technology

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