The Power of Mobility: How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution

Chapter 3. The Law of Mobility Signals Transformation

The Internet Connects the World

From the earliest days, the government, and especially the Defense Department was the biggest customer of the emerging computer industry. Much of this spending was done in university research labs.

In 1951, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) founded Lincoln Labs, focused on air defense. The projects undertaken at Lincoln required collecting data from many sources, resulting in Lincoln becoming a hotbed for innovations in computer networking.

In the second half of 1957, the Soviet Union test-fired the first intercontinental ballistic missile and launched the Sputnik I artificial satellite, initiating the arms race and the space race. In January 1958, President Eisenhower established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to address these threats.

J. C. R. Licklider, a Lincoln veteran, became the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within ARPA. Early in 1963, Licklider proposed networking together the computers in research labs being funded by ARPA to make these expensive resources more available and productive. In 1966, Bob Taylor replaced Licklider as head of the IPTO and recruited Larry Roberts from Lincoln Labs to turn this concept into reality.

The network, dubbed ARPAnet by Roberts, ended up building upon advances in computer networking made by Roberts at MIT, Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, Paul ...