ARPAnet
From The Ultimate Programming Reference
[edit] History
In the late 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) sponsered a confrence at which several dozen ARPA-funded graaduate students were brought together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to meet and share ideas. During this conference, ARPA rolled out the blueprints fir networking the main computer systems of about a dozen ARPA-funded universities and research institutions. They were to be connected with communications lines operating at a then-stunning 56kbps (56,000 bits per second), this at a time when most people (of the few who could be) were connecting over telephone lines to computers at a rate of 110 bits per second. Shortly after this conference, ARPA proceeded to implement what quickly became the ARPAnet, the grandparent of today's Internet.
