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COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM February 1997/Vol. 40, No. 2 103 computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was much like the Internet today. While at DARPA, 3 he convinced the people who would be his successors there—Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts—of the importance of this networking concept. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 [5]. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits—a major step toward computer networking. The other key step was to make the computers talk to each other. Exploring this idea in 1965 while working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts to the Q-32 in California through a low-speed dial-up telephone line [8 …