The Internet’s Reinventions PlanetLab aims to transform today’s
dumb, simple Internet communications system into a smarter and
much more flexible network that can ward off worms, store huge
amounts of data with perfect security, and deliver content
instantly. Here’s how it fits into a long tradition of academic
and government research projects that developed fundamental
networking, transmission, and distributed-computing
technologies. The first major attempt to use computers for
communication, and the testing ground for the standards that
would come to define the Internet. Built by universities and
technology firms with funding from the U.S. Defense Department’s
Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA). A network of
smaller networks in which computers exchange packets of data
formatted and addressed according to, respectively, the
Transport Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP),
which were conceived in 1973 and officially replaced the
ARPANET’s protocols in January 1983. The Multicast Backb