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To answer your question we entered the phrase "Internet history" in Yahoo!'s search box. The most promising result was the Internet > History category. There we found web sites containing both narrative histories and point-by-point timelines. We used a timeline from GTE Internetworking to get a quick overview of more than thirty years of Net history, beginning back in the late 1950s. The U.S. Department of Defense project called "ARPANET" was first conceived during the Cold War with the goal of creating a distributed communications network that could survive a nuclear attack. After reading that, we happened to notice that ARPANET warrants its very own Yahoo! subcategory. We found several sites about the Advanced Research Projects Agency describing the first nodes of the Net: "ARPANET began in the fall of 1969 with the successful linking of four computers known as IMPS or Interface Message Processors, which were located at the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah." Returning to Yahoo!'s Internet History category, we followed up with some longer accounts, including the definitive Hobbes' Internet Timeline, which tracks the Internet's
transition from defense project to academic research network to global, commercial entity in glorious year-by-year detail; and the excellent Networking the Nerds, from Robert X. Cringley's Nerds 2.01 TV show. Finally, we read up on the history of the World Wide Web, and how the development of HTML, HTTP, and the web browser really launched an Internet for all.
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