1. How did the Internet get started?

The Internet's roots can be traced back to 1957 when the United States formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD). The formation of ARPA was the United States' response to the former Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. ARPA's mission was to establish the United States as the world's leading country in defense- and military-applicable science and technology. ARPA, which later became known as Defense ARPA (DARPA), established in 1969 an early internetwork called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. The builder of ARPANET was a company named Bolt, Baranek, and Newman, which later became known as BBN Communications. Originally, the Internet meant ARPANET, and access to ARPANET was restricted to the military, defense contractors, and university personnel involved in defense research. ARPANET technology was based on packet-switching, and in 1969, with the connection of its first four nodes Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and University of Utah ARPANET heralded the era of packet-switching networking.

1. I recall that the university I attended had a BITNET connection. Was this similar to ARPANET?

Not quite. BITNET, which stood for Because It's Time Network, was a low-speed and inexpensive academic network consisting of interconnected IBM mainframes. BITNET was one of several cooperative, decentralized computer networks that formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s on college and university campuses to serve the...