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A pioneering Network that formed
the basis of the internet. Arpanet began life in 1969 as a testbed for new
networking technologies funded by the United States Defense Advanced
Research Project Agency (darpa). Its decentralised structure, in
which no single node has overall control of the network, was
conceived amid concerns about the vulnerability of centralised
structures to sudden upsets (such as nuclear war). The networks that
replaced Arpanet (a new military network, the Defense Data Network, and
Nsfnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by
America's National Science Foundation) evolved into the backbone of
today's internet. The process continues as this backbone is turned over to a
consortium of commercial providers. |
