In the early 1960s, the vision for a research program aimed at networking computers took shape at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA). As early as 1965, ARPA was sponsoring research into cooperative time-sharing computers and packet switching. Plans for the ARPANET began to take shape in 1966, and in 1968 DARPA awarded a key contract to Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN) to produce a key component in implementing the network, interface message processors (or IMPs). A year later, the first nodes in the ARPANET became active, allowing research in host-to-host protocols and how best to utilize network resources. By 1971, the ARPANET included 15 nodes, and work was underway on e-mail. As noted in an earlier CSTB report, however, the ARPANET was not DARPA’s only networking research activity—the organization also supported related research on terrestrial and satellite packet radio networks.
The mid to late 1980s saw continuing DARPA-supported research and development in areas such as routers and their protocols. Meanwhile, the speed of the NSFNet’s backbone saw great improvement, and the Domain Name System, a critical component facilitating Internet growth and reliability, was introduced. NSF support was also critical to the development of the first widely used graphical Web browser, Mosaic, which was developed in 1993 by a researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The Internet was highly successful in meeting the original vision of enabling computers to communicate across diverse networks and in the face of heterogeneous underlying communications technologies.10 Its success—measured in terms of commercial investment, wide use, and large installed base—is also widely understood to have made innovation in the Internet much harder over time. (Innovation in the Internet’s architecture proper should be distinguished from innovative uses of the network, which have flourished as a direct consequence of the Internet’s flexible, general-purpose design.) CSTB’s Looking Over the Fence at Networks: A Neighbor’s View of Networking Research
Growing consumer demand and the need to make better use of available spectrum resources fueled the development of a second generation of wireless technologies (also commonly referred to as 2G technologies). This second generation marked the transition to a fully digital technology, providing enhanced quality and enabling better use of spectrum resources. While the European wireless industry settled on global system for mobile communications (GSM) for its 2G standard, two major wireless standards emerged in the United States: time division multiple access (TDMA), a technology standard adopted by the Telecommunications Industry Association in 1989; and code division multiple access (CDMA), a newer, competing technology developed and championed by Qualcomm. 2G technology included many improvements over first-generation technology; for example, 2G included such advanced digital features as compression, network control techniques, bandwidth conservation measures, and full support for voice mail.
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