Read the passage. Then, fill in the graphic organizer with the central idea of the passage and supporting details that convey the central idea. The Origins of the Internet
All of the men were nervous as they waited. But Len Kleinrock was the most nervous.
The year was 1969, and just over 20 people were crowded into the room. A group of pale men
in their 20s and 30s, the computer scientists stood beside executives from big telephone
companies. The men tapped their feet impatiently. They waited.
The computer itself loomed along the wall, 15 feet wide and 35 feet long. A long grey
cable snaked from the computer to a smaller machine, the router or “switch,” in the corner.
The two machines were important, but the real reason the men had gathered was the activity
happening in that long grey cable. They were about to see whether information could
successfully flow between a computer and router, for the first time in history.
At the center of the group was Len Kleinrock, the 35‐year‐old star of computer
networking. Kleinrock was a professor at UCLA and was the one who had engineered this
system. “Everybody was ready to point the finger if it didn’t work,” said Kleinrock. “Happily,
the bits began to flow from the host to router. I like to refer to that day as when the Internet
took its first breath of life, first connected to the real world. It’s like when a baby is born and
has its first experience of the outside world.”
For Kleinrock, that moment had been almost a decade in the making. He originally
became interested in the problem of network connection while working on the East Coast. He

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recalled, “I looked around at MIT and Lincoln Laboratories [sic]: I was surrounded by computers
and recognized that one day they’re going to have to talk to each other. And it was clear that
there was no adequate technology to allow that.”
At the same time that Kleinrock was growing absorbed in the problems of network
connection, the United States government was ramping up its investment in science and
technology research. The Soviet Union’s famous launch of a satellite called Sputnik had been
an embarrassment for the United States—the United States thought that it should be the
leader of space travel. Eisenhower created a branch within the Department of Defense to
ensure that the scientific leadership of America wouldn’t be eclipsed again in the future. This
new organization, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), became one of the major
engines of technological innovation throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1962, while Kleinrock was finishing up graduate school, ARPA created a new
department devoted to computer science. The head of this division was J. C.R. Licklider, a
fellow scientist at MIT who also worked on network structures.
“He was one of those visionaries who foresaw the advantages of combining humans
with computer,” said Kleinrock of his former colleague and boss. “He created a concept called
man‐computer symbiosis, recognizing that if you put the two together, you could get very
significant results.” Licklider ran into political problems at ARPA and ultimately left to return to
MIT, but not until he had planted the idea of networking as a concept worthy of funding.
Bob Taylor took over ARPA’s computer science division in 1966 and reinvigorated the
project. Taylor had been funding different projects in computer science departments at
universities across the country and realized it was growing too costly to give each department
the machines and resources to do every task. What he needed was a way for geographically
far‐flung research centers to somehow share each other’s computing resources. Taylor needed
to create a network. The man he brought in to build it, Larry Roberts, happened to be
Kleinrock’s old officemate at MIT.
“We were all intimately familiar with each other’s work, so when they asked, Roberts
said, ‘Look, I know exactly what this technology should be, and I know it can work. Len
Kleinrock has already proven it,’” recalled Kleinrock. “And bang, the project came to life. After
a number of years, it came to action.”
And so it was that all of the men were crowded into the room watching a long grey
cable. An air conditioner hummed in the background, fighting against both the heat outside