Roberts and the ARPA team refine the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET. They issue an RFQ for the development of the IMPs. At Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Frank Heart leads a team to bid on the project. Bob Kahn plays a major role in shaping the overall BBN designs. BBN wins the project in December. Roberts works with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation designing the network topology and economics. Kleinrock’s team prepares the network measurement system at UCLA, which is to become the site of the first node. The ILLIAC IV, the largest supercomputer of its time, is being built at Burroughs under a NASA contract. More than 1,000 transistors are squeezed onto its RAM chip, manufactured by the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, yielding 10 times the speed at one-hundredth the size of equivalent core memory. ILLIAC-IV will be hooked to the ARPANET so that remote scientists can have access to its unique capabilities.
1968
