In the late 1960s, computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) were working on a problem: how to share data and resources among computers that were not physically connected to each other. Their solution was ARPANET, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.

ARPANET was the first wide-area network (WAN), and it revolutionized computing by making it possible for computers to communicate with each other over long distances. The original ARPANET consisted of four nodes or locations where computers were connected to the network: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. By 1971, there were 15 nodes on ARPANET; by 1973 there were 37, and by 1975 there were 113 nodes.

Today we take for granted that we can connect to anyone in the world from anywhere else in the world via email or instant messaging or video chat. But it all started with ARPANET – a project conceived in 1967 by Bob Taylor of DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). Taylor realized that as digital technologies proliferated throughout American universities and defense research laboratories – but before these isolated “islands” could be linked together into a cohesive whole – tremendous opportunities existed for scientific collaboration if only researchers could share their work more easily across great distances.