Monday, March 16, 2015

ARPANET logical map circa 1977

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Arpanet_logical_map%2C_march_1977.png

or:
en:File:Arpnet-map-march-1977.png

If you click on the blue one or cut and paste the top one you can see what I'm writing about here. Basically, what it is is a logical map of the location of each participating computer in this network in 1977 created by Arpanet. Likely what we are looking at in this particular one is university and college computers set up in a network as a communication network. So, this network is likely historic because it is a research network. Though it likely was also military to some degree and military money likely helped fund this computer network, it also was the domestic beginnings of the Internet outside of a completely military framework to avoid nuclear war. The military network would have been Darpanet and not just arpanet and would have been used had a real nuclear war began which redundantly allowed all information to keep government at all levels in place even if one or more cities were gone forever in the U.S. from nuclear blasts. So, we have nuclear preparedness in the U.S. to thank for the existence of the Internet worldwide now. 

If you look at the top left it is "Moffet" for Moffet Field which is a Naval Air base that they used to fly dirigibles out of during world War II. One of my uncles was a Naval Air Captain of a Dirigible then. As you travel down the left side you see Stanford. Across the top from left to right you have
Utah, Illinois and MIT. So, the easiest places to recognize where they have space to put actual places more easily is on the outside rim of this logical map for Arpanet which was the Internet in 1977 which was connected by dedicated phone lines all across the U.S. at that time.

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