It will be fifty years ago on Friday that the Interface Message Processor was deployed to connect research institutions via Arpanet. The device can be seen as the very first router and therefore an important building block for what the internet would become.
In 1967, the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency discussed what a network of computers might look like. The proposal was made to place a ‘small computer between each host computer and the network of transmission cables’ as a gateway.
Bolt Beranek and Newman, BBN, now owned by defense company Raytheon, was tasked with manufacturing this packet switching node. The company delivered the first copy of the Interface Message Processor to Leonard Kleinrock’s research team, who worked on Arpanet at UCLA, on August 30.
Combined with an SDS Sigma-7 mainframe with its own front panels, the Interface Message Processor was able to route messages of up to 8159bit containing the address of hosts on the network. This made the device the forerunner of today’s router and an essential part of Arpanet, the predecessor of today’s internet.
Photo: FastLizard4 CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia