Internet was at its heart. The Internet created demand for telecommunications; along the way, it helped create an expectation of demand that did not materialize. The Internet's commercializa- tion and rapid growth led to a supply of "dotcom" vendors; that led to an expec- tation of customers that did not materialize. But the Internet itself was not at fault. The Internet, after all, was not one thing at all; as its name implies, it was a concatenation [1] of networks, under separate ownership, connected by an understanding that each was more valuable because it was able to connect to the others. That value was not reduced by the mere fact that many people overesti- mated it. The ARPAnet Was a Seminal Research Network The origins of the Internet are usually traced to the ARPAnet, an experimental network created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a unit of the U.S. Department of Defense, in conjunction with academic and commercial contrac- tors. The ARPAnet began as a small research project in the 1960s. It was pio- neering packet-switching technology, the sending of blocks of data between computers. The telephone network was well established and improving rapidly, though by today's standards it was rather primitive-digital transmission and switching were yet to come. But the telephone network was not well suited to the bursty nature of data. The Great Telecom Meltdown A number of individuals and companies played a crucial role in the ARPAnet's early days [2]. It is unlikely, though, that any of them envisioned what would come of it 30 years later. The ARPAnet was designed to connect government facilities with their suppliers and academic researchers. It was not open to the public at large but grew from its original three nodes in 1969 to sev- eral hundred a decade later (see Figure 4.1). Along the way, many changes were made to the technology. This was, after all, a research network, and the network itself was the heart of the research. In the early ARPAnet, the machines that interconnected computers were c