1969 - Birth of a Network (ARPANET)

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the world's first wide area packet switching network and the progenitor of what was to become the global Internet. The network was initially funded by the Advanced (ARPA, later DARPA) within the U.S. 

The Internet began as a Cold War project to create a communications network that was immune to a nuclear attack. In the 1969, the U.S. government created ARPANET, connecting four western universities and allowing researchers to use the mainframes of any of the networked institutions. 

In its first 25 years, the Internet added features such as file transfer, email, Usenet news, and eventually HTML. 

ARPANET allowed government and research institutions to share information through "packet switching," which allowed a message on a network to find its way to its destination via any route available.

In the mid-60's, Paul Baran of the RAND Institute was commissioned by the Air Force to study how to maintain command and control after a nuclear attack. The solution that Baran suggested involved a technology called "packet switching," which would allow a message on a network to find its destination via any route available. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) believed that Baran's theory would work and that such a network would not only fulfill the Air Force's original missions, but would also answer the agency's need for sharing information between its many research institutions. In 1969, ARPANET was born

It was establish to study how to maintain command and control after a nuclear attack for the US military.

The initial focus of the ARPANET was remote login to computers and file sharing.