Arpanet grew fast and more academic groups in
the USA were connected to the resource sharing
network. The research and development con-
cerned many technical and scientific areas and a
wide spectrum of applications were pursued in
addition to computer and networking techniques
themselves. The numbers of people and research
groups connected with the Arpanet far outnum-
bered the relatively few that worked on the basic
Internet-technology itself.
Examples of applications being investigated and
connected to the Arpanet as early as 1972 were
weather forecast, funds transfer, understanding
of natural language (e.g. natural question-ask-
ing), telephone conferencing, mathematical anal-
ysis, and others. The purposes of the use of the
network were many. One example was an inter-
active program for mathematical analysis –
“Macsyma” – at MIT. That program was avail-
able for use through the Arpanet for several
years for anybody interested. Thus a great num-
Resource sharing networks. This drawing covered the program
of one of the first conferences publishing the Arpanet effortIn 1969 Arpanet was first built
as a packet switched computer
network for resource sharing.
Many academic groups in wide
fields of research joined
during the first years. By 1974
the Arpanet extended west to
Hawaii and east to Norway
and England