ARPAnet—the Advanced Research Projects Agency network—was a wide-area network (WAN), which is a computer network covering a fairly large geographical area, that eventually consisted of about 60,000 computer systems around the United States. ARPAnet began as a slow (by current standards), academically oriented network that eventually turned into today's all-pervasive Internet. It was established in 1969 by the United States Department of Defense and developed under a research and development contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the free interchange of information between universities and research organizations, and for communications among branches of the U.S. military. Under this contract ARPAnet was developed primarily as a trial for new networking technologies. The project was headed by a few remarkably talented technology scientists from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company called Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). The original ARPAnet--the first computer network--was created with the purpose...