In 1969 the Advanced Research Agency of the U.S. The Department of Defense funded a project called the ARPANET. The ARPANET was a network that connected different host computers together, making data transmission between distant computers possible. Claire Evans has an interesting chapter about the development of the ARPANET in her book that is worth checking out.1 In 1966 Robert Taylor, director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) was physically moving between three computer terminals that were connected to three different mainframes in his office. It was the sheer inconvenience of this configuration that sparked the idea for finding a way to access one mainframe from any terminal. From this the ARPANET was born. The goals of the network weren’t immediately social but rather focused on facilitating academic research and sharing resources by linking computers between the research labs where they were stationed. Most of the research around the ARPANET was taking place at institutions like MIT and Stanford, but the project being facilitated by the Department of Defense also meant that the practical applications of the network were envisioned with military goals in mind .
In the days of the ARPANET the distinction between users and producers did not exist. The people who were building the network were the ones using it. This is interesting to think about because, as Abbate2 points out, it “led the ARPANET’s builders to adopt a new paradigm for managing the evolution of the system: rather than centralize design authority in a small group of network managers they, they deliberately created a system that allowed any user with the requisite skill and interest to propose a new feature.” (Abbate, 5) This paradigm created a communal attitude towards network development that would also apply to how software that facilitated content across the network was being distributed to its users. The Open Access constitution of the ARPANET worked well in an academic context because it promoted the sharing of ideas but for military users open access posed security risks. This resulted in the ARPANET branching out into a second network, the MILNET, in 1983 (Abbate, 142-43). As the ARPANET continued to expand throughout the 1980s other networks began to pop up in the periphery and the National Science Foundation began building networks of its own.