ARPANET

ARPANET is an acronym that stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network and it was an early packet switching network and the first one to implement the concept of the TCP/IP stack, originally an effort by a small research group from the MIT. ARPANET was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Packet switching succeded the idea of circuit switching for voice and data communications based on end to end communication. The (temporarily) dedicated line is typically composed of many intermediary lines which are assembled into a chain that stretches all the way from the originating station to the destination station. With packet switching, a data system could use a single communication link to communicate with more than one machine by collecting data into datagrams and transmitting these as packets onto the attached network link, as soon as the link becomes idle.