History of the Internet

During the spring of 1969, BBN got their first Honywell 516 delivered to them. The 516, or IMP number 0, would soon be found to have multiple problems with the hardware configurations giving the "IMP Guys" even more headaches . Ben Baker, who joined just after IMP 0 arrived, and Ornstein, worked all summer fixing and correcting the bugs of the first IMP. When IMP number one arrived, two weeks before Labor day, Baker and Ornstein expected the machine to have some problems but when they turned it on, it did not work. With very little time left, Baker was forced to fix IMP 1 at BBN. The first IMP was finished in time and shipped to UCLA on September 1^st.

At UCLA, the man in charge of the IMP that was to arrive on September 1^st was Len KleinRock. The students who worked with Kleinrock to make their Sigma-7 computer compatible with the IMP By writing a Network Protocol was Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf and Jon Postel.

On October the 1^st 1969, IMP number 2 arrived at SRI on time and the first characters were transmitted over the new network, these characters were "L, G and O." The ARPAnet was born.

IMP number 3 arrived at UC Santa Barbra on November 1 and in December IMP number 4 was installed at University of Utah. Around this time Telnet evolved to allow users to log in to the other computers. Due to the structure of the four connections, if data from a computer at UCLA was requested to go to Utah, it would have to go through the IMP at SRI. If for some reason the IMP at SRI was down, the information would not be able to travel to Utah so a new system of connections had to be thought up.

By the summer of 1970, MIT, RAND,System Development Corp. and Harvard got IMP number 6 to 9 respectively, a second high speed cross continent line of 50 Killobits was added to go from BBN to RAND making a total of two cross continent high speed lines leaving BBN. In November 1970, Alex McKenzie was in charge of the new Network Control Center at BBN. BBN wanted to create a smaller IMP and by the end of 1970, ARPA gave the OK to fund development of the new Honeywell 316 to replace the old and large 516. One of the problems with an the old IMP was that it could only support a maximum of four terminals at a time and people were requesting multiple terminal connections. BBN developed a new Terminal IMP called a TIP that could hold up to 63 terminals at once, a significant difference from the old IMP. The new TIP was delivered to BBN late in the summer of 1971 to be debugged before it was shipped out again.

TCP/IP