Bob Metcalf

The ARPANET connected large mainframe computers together via smaller gateway computers, or routers, known as Interface Message Processors (IMPs). On September 1, 1969, the first IMP arrived at UCLA. A month later the second one was installed at Stanford. The UC Santa Barbara and then the University of Utah.

The ARPANET continued to grow. Networking technology continued to develop as people like Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet, and Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse among other things, pushed the technology's envelope. Other computer networks, like Hawaii's ALOHANET and the satellite linked network SATNET, began to spring up. Soon the were many different computer networks all over the world, but they could not communicate with one another because they used different protocols, or standards for transmitting data. Then in 1974, Vint Cerf (known to some as the "father of the Internet"), along with Bob Kahn, wrote a new protocol, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol, that would become the accepted standard. The implementation of TCP allowed the various networks to connect into a true "internet."