My Internet Resolution for 2001 is to learn the Web all over again. I have been so engulfed in preaching from the mountaintops of the Internet's unyielding powers, that I have strayed from the most important thing, "knowing the Internet." What it's about, where it came from, what it does. Feel free to join me for a quick jaunt down memory lane.
In late 1966, Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET," publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the United Kingdom by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. It happened that the work at M.I.T. (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the others' work.