THE

INTERNET
DURING
THE COLD
WAR
During the Cold War there was constant fear of
nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and desire
to be "better" than the United States at
everything. Once the USSR launched Sputnik in
1957 the United States felt that technologically
they were falling too far behind the Soviet
Union.[1] To help prevent nuclear attack,
enhance the United States technology, and
ensure the safety of the people the ARPANET
was created by the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA, later DARPA), a branch of the
military that developed top secret systems and
weapons during the Cold War.[1] Although the
internet that we know of today differs greatly
from the ARPANET, it served its purpose of
preventing a nuclear strike well. The internet is
sometimes considered "A Child of the Cold
War" or "The Cold War's Baby.
Four computers were the first connected in the
original ARPANET. They were located in the
respective computer research labs of UCLA,
Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of
Utah.[1] ARPANET protected the flow of
information between military installations by
creating a network of geographically separated
computers that could exchange information via a
newly developed protocol (rule for how computers
interact) called NCP (Network Control Protocol).[3]
One opposing view to ARPANET's origins comes
from Charles M. Herzfeld, the former director of
ARPA.[3] Herzfeld claimed that ARPANET was not
created as a result of a military need. He felt that the
frustration from investigators across the country of
only having a limited number of supercomputers for
research caused them to create ARPANET so that
they could be connected while in different locations
throughout the country.[1] This made it easier to
communicate the possible nuclear threats. However,
as early as the mid 1980s, Soviet intelligence had
access to Western computer networks.
New connections were soon added to the
network, bringing the number of "nodes" up
to 23 in 1971, 111 in 1977, and up to almost
4 million in 1994.[5] The invention and
development of the ARPANET directly led
to the development of the internet we know
of today. As the size of the network grew so
did its capabilities. In its first 25 years the
Internet added features such as file transfer,
email, Usenet news, and eventually HTML.
[5] Now, new developments are added to
the Net at a rapid rate. The explosive growth
of the internet has involved millions of
computer users all over the world and has
led to the constant development of new
technologies that require network transfer.
THANK YOU
by: Francezca Moira V. Ileto
Dhana Duenas and Fiona mendoza