Growing Needs

It was hoped that this network would also serve another growing need.

The Department of Defense bought computers for the various agencies around the country that were doing Department of Defense research. However, there was no way for the different sites to access a computer at another site. The ability to do so would be advantageous in two major respects:

  1. Each research site tended to have a different make and model of computer. This meant, then, that each site was likely to have certain computer capabilities that the computer at another site might not have. The IPTO researchers wished that they could occasionally make use of the capabilities of another research site's computer.
  2. The researchers at the various Department of Defense research sites collaborated on various research projects. However, there was no easy way for the computers at their respective sites to share data. Not only was distance the problem: different makes of computers were incompatible with others (not unlike the incompatibility of PCs and Macintosh computers today).

Thus, the networking of computers was not merely a hardware problem—i.e., a matter of constructing a physical connection between computers. Rather, the project also presented a significant software problem: namely, how to make it possible for incompatible computers to exchange information.

 

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This chapter was written by Jeff Nyhoff and Joel Adams. Copy editing by Nancy Zylstra
©2005 Calvin College, All Rights Reserved

If you encounter technical errors, contact rit@calvin.edu.