ARPANet

ARPANET
ARPANET logical map, March 1977
Type	Data
Location	United States
	NCP, TCP/IP
Established	1969; 48 years ago (1969)
Closed	1990
Commercial?	No
Funding	Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. ARPANET was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

The packet switching methodology employed in the ARPANET was based on concepts and designs by Americans Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies, and Lawrence Roberts. The TCP/IP were developed for ARPANET by computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, and incorporated concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin.

As the project progressed, protocols for internetworking were developed by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.