Networking and Internetworking - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 35

Projects Agency DARPA. BBN played an important part in the implementa-
tion and operation of ARPANET.
The “@” sign used in an e-mail address was a BBN innovation.
Ray Tomlinson of BBN Technologies developed a program that
allowed electronic mail to be sent over the ARPANET. Tomlinson
developed the “user@host” convention, and this was eventually
to become the standard for electronic mail in the late 1980s.
Various groups, including National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the RAND
Corporation, and MIT, commenced work on packet-switching networks. The
concept of packet switching was invented by Donald Davies at the NPL in
1965. Packet switching is a fast message communication system between
computers. Long messages are split into packets that are then sent separately
so as to minimize the risk of congestion.
At that time, a basic problem for Licklider was the lack of language and
machine standardization. The early computers had different standards for
representing data, and this meant that the data standard of each computer
would need to be known for effective communication to take place. There
was a need to establish a standard for data representation, and a US gov-
ernment committee developed the ANSII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange) in 1963. This became the first universal standard
for data for computers, and it allowed machines from different manufactur-
ers to exchange data. The standard allowed 7-bit binary strings to stand for a
letter in the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, or a punctuation symbols;
the use of 7 bits allowed 128 distinct characters to be represented. The devel-
opment of the IBM-360 mainframe standardized the use of 8 bits for a word,
and 12-bit or 36-bit words became obsolete.
Davies also worked on the ACE computer (one of the earliest stored pro-
gram computers) that was developed at the NPL in the United Kingdom in
the late 1940s. The first wide area network connection was created in 1965. It
involved the connection of a computer at MIT to a computer in Santa Monica
via a dedicated telephone line. This result showed that telephone lines could
be used for the transfer of data although they were expensive in their use of
bandwidth. The need to build a network of computers became apparent to
ARPA in the mid-1960s, and this led to work commencing on the ARPANET
project in 1966. The plan was to implement a packet-switched network based
on the theoretical work done on packet switching at NPL and MIT. The goal
was to have a network speed of 56 Kbps. ARPANET was to become the
world's first packet-switched network.
BBN Technologies was awarded the contract to implement the network.
Two nodes were planned for the network initially, and the goal was to