The Internet was created first within the strategic problem of Cold War command and control, where rapid and reliable digital communication became a military priority after the Space Race and the Cuban Missile Crisis. ARPA’s funding environment treated computing and communications as components of a single defense system that had to function across continental distance. In this context, Paul Baran’s “On Distributed Communications” proposed a network with no central switching point, able to continue operating even when parts of it were destroyed, and introduced packet switching as a way to use limited lines efficiently under heavy and unpredictable load. Thus, when ARPANET adopted a distributed packet-switched design, it was implementing a solution to a pre-existing communications problem: maintaining responsive, resource-efficient links among geographically dispersed computing sites.
Second, the Internet was created to turn computing from an isolated, local resource into a coordinated, real-time system for research. Advanced work in air defense and weapons development depended on a small number of expensive and incompatible computers scattered across universities and contractors funded by ARPA. J. C. R. Licklider’s vision of a networked computing environment and his investment in time-sharing addressed this institutional inefficiency directly. A network would allow a researcher at one terminal to log into a distant machine, run its programs, and access its specialized hardware without duplicating resources at every site. In this sense ARPANET was designed as a national infrastructure for interactive computing, binding together a distributed research community that already existed but could not yet function as a single system.
Finally, the Internet was created to make interconnection possible without forcing different networks or institutions into a single technical or administrative hierarchy. By the early 1970s ARPA was operating multiple packet-switched systems, each built for different environments and under different forms of control. Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn’s development of TCP/IP solved the problem of how these heterogeneous networks could communicate while remaining autonomous. The protocol placed reliability at the edges and treated each network as a peer, a design that matched the reality that no single university, contractor, or military office could dictate standards to the others. At the same time, Licklider and Robert Taylor’s “The Computer as a Communication Device” shows that the network was already understood as a medium for human collaboration as well as machine interaction. The Internet therefore originated as a system for linking people, computers, and institutions across distance in a way that was efficient, resilient, and structurally decentralized.