Before 1957, computers only worked on one task at a time. This is called "batch processing". Of course, this was quite ineffective. With computers getting bigger and bigger, they had to be stored in special cooled rooms. But then the developers couldn't work directly on the computers anymore. Specialists had to be called in to connect them. Programming at that time meant a lot of manual work and the indirect connection to the computers led to a lot of bugs, wasting time and fraying the developers' nerves.

 

The year 1957 marked a big change: a remote connection had to be installed, so that the developers could work directly on the computers. At the same time, the idea of time-sharing came up. This is the first concept in computer technology to share the processing power of one computer with multiple users.

 

On October the 4th in 1957 during the Cold War, the first unmanned satellite Sputnik 1 was sent into orbit by the Soviet Union. The fear of a missile gap emerged. In order to secure America's lead in technology, the US founded the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency in February, 1958. At that time, knowledge was only transferred by people. The DARPA planned a large-scale computer network in order to accelerate knowledge transfer and avoid the doubling up of already existing research. This network would become the ARPANET.

 

Furthermore, three other concepts were to be developed, which are fundamental for the history of the Internet: the concept of a military network by the RAND Corporation in America, the commercial network of the National Physical Laboratory in England, and the scientific network CYCLADES in France. The scientific, military and commercial approaches of these concepts are the foundations for our modern Internet.

 

Let's begin with the ARPANET, the most familiar of these networks.

 

Its development began in 1966. Universities were generally quite cautious about sharing their computers; therefore, small computers were put in front of the mainframe. This computer, the Interface Message Processor, took over control of the network activities, while the mainframe was only in charge of the initialization of programs and data files. At the same time, the IMP also served as interface for the mainframe. Since only the IMPs were interconnected in a network, this was also called IMP Subnet.