hen up and running at full speed the computer could do upwards of 25 calculations per minute! (Prince, 1998, 2).
In the 1950s, military and University researchers at MIT and UCLA worked on developing massive computers such as ENIAC which was capable of handling the mathematical calculations for all sorts of data (Aggarwal, Cha, Wilemon, 1998). This led to a period of "mainframe" growth where Universities around the world began developing computer data centers to help military units. These machines were sophisticated, but faced one serious problem.
If a scientist in Palo Alto, for instance, wanted information from a computer data center in London, the only way that that data could be communicated was by mailing a paper printout of the data.
This problem was solved in 1973, when an MIT physicist Vinton Cerf was given a special project by the United States Department of Defense. The DOD wanted a way to link its computer databases throughout the wor
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