Sci&Tech History

In California 1969, the formation of the world’s first long-distance computer network, the ARPANET, funded by the US Departement of Defense(DOD) through its Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA). In October 1969, technicians from the Boston-based firm Bolt Beranek and newman linked together, via specially laid telephone lines, two computers hundreds of miles apart, one at UCLA, the other at the Stanford Research Institute. By the end of the year two more nodes had been added to this nascent net—the University of california at santa Barbara and the University of Utah—making a network of four sites.

By the next year, write computer historians Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, “the ARPA network was growing at a rate of about one node per month,” and by August 1972 it contained twenty-nine nodes located in universities and research centers across the USA. In these early years, when maintaining a site cost more than $100,000 per annum(with all the money coming from the DOD), growth was necessarily incremental. Indeed, by 1979, a decade after the first two sites were connected, there were still just sixty-one ARPANET sites.

Cyberspace exponentially expanding has its genesis parallels that of physical space. According to the latest theory of cosmology, before the smootlhy expanding universe we see today there was an early space of wildly excessive expansion that physicists refer to as the “inflationary” period. During this phase, space swelled from microscropic point smaller than a proton to the size of a grapefruit in a fraction of a second. In this larval stage, the rudiments of large-scale cosmic structure was laid down, the body-plan, as it were, for the galactic web that constitute the universe today(Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 1999).

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