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Intergalactic Computer Network or Galactic Network [1] (IGCN) was a computer networking concept similar to today's Internet.
J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at The Pentagon's ARPA, used the term in the early 1960s to refer to a networking system he "imagined as an electronic commons open to all, ‘the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals.'" [2] [3] An office memorandum he sent to his colleagues in 1963 was addressed to "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". [4] As head of IPTO from 1962 to 1964, "Licklider initiated three of the most important developments in information technology: the creation of computer science departments at several major universities, time-sharing, and networking." [3]
Licklider first learned about time-sharing from Christopher Strachey at the inaugural UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris in 1959. [5]
By the late 1960s, his promotion of the concept had inspired a primitive version of his vision called ARPANET. ARPANET expanded into a network of networks in the 1970s that became the Internet. [2]
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of the Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards. In 2012, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces".
This article presents a detailed timeline of events in the history of computing from 1950 to 1979. For narratives explaining the overall developments, see the history of computing.
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research", was part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered to be among the most prominent figures in computer science development and general computing history.
Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
Robert William Taylor, known as Bob Taylor, was an American Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.
SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing.
Wesley Allison Clark was an American physicist who is credited for designing the first modern personal computer. He was also a computer designer and the main participant, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC computer, which was the first minicomputer and shares with a number of other computers the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.
The CYCLADES computer network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking.
Lawrence Gilman Roberts was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002.
Nicola Pellow is an English mathematician and information scientist who was one of the nineteen members of the WWW Project at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student enrolled on a sandwich course at Leicester Polytechnic. Pellow recalled having little experience with programming languages, "... apart from using a bit of Pascal and FORTRAN as part of my degree course."
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.
Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing is a short documentary film from 1972, produced by Steven King and directed/edited by Peter Chvany, about ARPANET, an early packet switching network and one of the first networks to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP.
The Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is one of the most prestigious single-track academic conferences on operating systems.
The NPL network, or NPL Data Communications Network, was a local area computer network operated by a team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London that pioneered the concept of packet switching.
The BBN Time-Sharing System was an early time-sharing system created at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) for the PDP-1 computer. It began operation in September 1962.
A long-running debate in computer science known as the Protocol Wars occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s and has since resulted in most other protocols disappearing.