A Brief History of the Computer

Interface Message Processor, 1969
Conceived at the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. government sought a way to keep its network of computers alive in case certain nodes were destroyed in a nuclear attack or other hostile act, the IMP featured the first generation of gateways, which are today known as routers. As such, IMP performed a critical task in the development of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the contemporary global Internet.

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