How the internet was 'born' in the Pentagon? Essay

As a young child growing up in a world connected by the World Wide Web, I had always been ignorant of how the internet came to be. As I grew up and started to ask myself questions of how things came to be, I found myself wondering about how the internet came alive. My thinking was in line with the current happenings - young vibrant scientists coming up with life-changing ideas. Therefore, I thought that the internet was invented by a young, explorative and ambitious scientist in one of the top technology schools. This article has changed that view, I have found insight of how the internet was 'born' in the Pentagon and heavily funded by the government.
Having experienced and enjoyed some of the benefits of the internet, it is would be obvious that it was always a welcomed idea. Much to my dismay, Bob Taylor of ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) explains that his idea of having one terminal interconnecting computers was at first unwelcomed. Lein Kleinrock of UCLA explains that people were unwelcoming of the idea of sharing a computer with another person. Even some universities and top technology companies like AT&T rejected the idea.
It is also interesting to know that the team at BBN that formulated packet switching Dave Walden, Frank Heart, Severo Ornstein and team did not know what to do. Frank Heart explains that once they accepted the challenge from Pentagon to go ahead with inventing the first digital computer network, they did not know how to go about it too. The team however, came up with IMP (Instant Message Processor), which is now called a router. This minicomputer was able to receive messages in form of packets from computers, sort and correct them then send them to other local machines. When other IMPs were availed, the first IMP was able to send messages across the ARPAnet. I had expected that this work took the BBN team years to complete it, but t only took the team 9 months to complete the first IMP. Len Kleinrock of UCLA explains that in 1969, the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, bits were flowing from the IMP to his host computer.
During the time ARPAnet was under development, another project was going on under DARPA - The spaceship project. It was easy to get excited by the space-ship project and overlook the computer projects. Going to space is an exciting idea after all. But I was able to appreciate that this did not happen because there was no government committee that had been put in place to oversee the ARPA project as a whole. This enabled Bob Taylor, the person in charge of computers to make independent decisions, unrelated to the space-ship project. In my opinion, this independence contributed a great deal to the success of packet-switching and ARPAnet as a whole.
From this reading, I have appreciated the process, time and challenges that all formed part the development of what we have today - the internet.