CHAPTER1
Looking Back: Where DidIt All Begin?
That was the first breath of life the Internet ever took.
—Leonard Kleinrock, ARPANET founder
A history of the Internet ought to begin at the beginning. But determining when and how the Internet began is difficult, not unlike defining the moment at which life begins, or determining who was responsible for the atomic bomb.
One is tempted to say that the Internet began with the first connection of two computers; no one knows for certain when and where that occurred. We do know that in the 1950s the U.S. Air Force developed the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) radar system, which relied on computers communicating with one another from several different sites, using some of the earliest modems. ...
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