Internet History

1969 - Birth of a Network The Internet as we know it today, in the mid-1990s, traces it origins back to a Defense Department project in 1969. The subject of the project was wartime digital communications. At that time the telephone system was about the only theater-scale communications system in use. A major problem had been identified in its design - its dependence on switching stations that could be targeted during an attack. Would it be possible to design a network that could quickly reroute digital traffic around failed nodes? A possible solution had been identified in theory. That was to build a "web" of datagram network, called an "catenet", and use dynamic routing protocols to constantly adjust the flow of traffic through the catenet. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the DARPA Internet Program.