In 1958, the U.S. Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), whose mission is to develop and test new technologies.

One of their early projects was the ARPA network project (ARPANET), which was designed to find ways to overcome problems that prevented different computer systems from communicating with each other, to allow a user in one location to use a computer in another location. The first ARPANET connection was set up between UCLA and Stanford in 1969, and ARPA gradually added computers at other universities and research agencies across the United States to the network into the 1980s.

Many sources state that the Internet has its origins in ARPANET. Although ARPANET did lay much of the groundwork for the development of the Internet, there is no direct line of development from the ARPANET to the Internet. Instead, the development of the Internet happened as a series of separate events around the world, all of which came together to create the Internet people use today.