ARPANET: the early years
These days it’s difficult to imagine a time before the internet existed. It’s become so ubiquitous in our lives that we use it for just about anything that we want to share with others (including list poems ;)
Have you ever wondered how we got into the business of sharing our business with people from around the world?
Looking at this page
https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/
you'll find an INTRODUCTION to the "Internet Society", www.isoc.org, published in 1997 by these guys here:
Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, Stephen Wolff.
What you won't find is any mention of this guy, Robert W. Taylor, who made a real contribution to ensuring the sustainability of ARPANET. Spoiler alert: that's the beginning of the internet as we know it today!
For that story, you'll have to check out this article from an archived, online edition of the New York Times, circa 1999. In this interview, Taylor describes some of the obstacles he had to face just getting ARPANET up and running. Many of the most challenging obstacles weren't necessarily technical in nature. As Taylor alludes to near the end of this interview,
"It was all there. It was physically there.
But it didn't happen for years."
Though you may have some difficulty verifying the existence of Licklider's alleged 1962 memo for a Galactic Network (as it turns out, this memo was likely written in April of 1963), it sounds like, theoretically-speaking, the internet had been lying around in spare parts for years. In late 1962, Licklider started working for ARPA and began a computer research program. At that time, Taylor was hanging out with some NASA folks at the Pentagon. He was quite impressed by Licklider and his writing (including Licklider's 1960 "Man-Computer Symbiosis", published in an I.E.E.E. Transactions journal). He accepts Licklider's offer to join an informal committee of people in the government who are supportive of computer research.
This meeting between Taylor and Licklider is somewhat pivotal in bringing ARPANET to life.
Regardless of when Licklider's idea about an "Intergalactic Computer Network" is pitched, it's obvious that Robert Taylor heard the message loud and clear. Even more importantly, Robert Taylor just so happened to be the right kind of lazy. As is noted in the Wikipedia ARPANET article, there are certain things that you feel you shouldn’t have to get up and cross the room for. When I read Taylor's interview, I immediately knew that he felt the same way.
"We had in my office three terminals to three different programs that ARPA was supporting.
One was to the Systems Development Corporation in Santa Monica. There was another terminal to the Genie Project at U.C. Berkeley. The third terminal was to the C.T.S.S. project that later became the Multics project at M.I.T. ...
if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this,
I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal,
go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.
I said, oh, man, it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals,
there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go
where you have interactive computing.
That idea is the ARPAnet."
In conclusion, the internet was invented because Robert Taylor got tired of having to get up, move to a different computer and login to a new terminal.