DARPA: The Hidden Technology Engine Turning War Research into Everyday Life

On 29 October 1969, a computer at UCLA sent the first characters to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute. The first two characters to arrive were simply "lo", and then the system crashed. At first the network connected only two hosts, and it grew to four nodes by December 1969. It was built so research centres could communicate even if one node was destroyed. That network was ARPANET. It became the foundation of the Internet.

ARPANET did not begin with a telephone company or a civilian app. It began with ARPA, an agency President Dwight Eisenhower created in 1958 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. ARPA later became DARPA and was tasked with creating technologies that could surprise an opponent. DARPA itself says that many of its projects later entered civilian life.