The internet was the created by a combined effort of leading computer engineers and experts. Among this group of people were Leonard Kleinrock, J.C.R. Licklider, Larry Roberts, and many others. In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider proposed the idea of a network that could connect all the computers around the globe with a single network. It would allow any data or information from a site to be accessed from anywhere in a short time. After leaving MIT, he joined the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was run by the U.S. Department of Defense, and he became the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office. Around this same time, the RAND published the On Distributed Communications Networks report. Paul Baran hypothesized the idea of using an analog signal to transmit messages that were divided into bits. These bits would travel across a network of nodes. The bits would attach to each other again at a node closest to the destination.
A record of the first message ever sent over the A...
English: Photograph taken from Leonard Kleinrock a...
English: This is a photo of the front panel of the...The purpose of it was to have a stable communications network that would survive nuclear warfare.
Donald Davies, another communications expert, proposed a similar idea to Baran's. It was based on the same concepts except these bits were called packets and it would use a different method of transmitting information. The name stuck and this idea was called the packet switching theory. Leonard Kleinrock wrote the first thesis on the packet switching theory at MIT in 1961. He convinced Lawrence Roberts that circuit switching would be inadequate in linking together two computers. In 1965, Thomas Merrill and Roberts created the first widespread network by linking together two computers, one in Massachusetts and the other in California. This project used a dial-up telephone line and it proved that packing switching would be more suitable to the job. Packet switching was superior because...