First, every one of the universities and research centers that had a contract with ARPA wanted the latest computers with the most capabilities. That was wasteful and duplicative. There might be a computer that did graphics in Salt Lake City and another that mined data at Stanford, but a researcher who needed to perform both tasks either had to go back and forth by plane or ask IPTO to fund another computer. Why couldn’t they be connected by a network that allowed them to time-share each other’s computer?
