The Hill News

The Internet as we know it today started as a small Department of Defense project as early as 1969. Back then, the Pentagon was looking for an alternate way of communicating, beyond the telephone system, during wartime threats. The best plan was to communicate across a “web” of networked computers â€" a program that was to be run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Created just after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1959 and long heralded as the whiz-bang arm of the Pentagon, DARPA quickly stepped into action and perfected the ARPANET, as it was first called, by 1983.

Just think, American ingenuity has done what hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, thousands of soldiers’ lives and all the might of the U.S. military war machine could not â€" spread democracy like a prairie fire.

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