Roberts, too, was opposed to a centralized approach, but decided to delay his final decision until he could bring up the topic with a large group. His chance came soon, at a meeting for ARPA’s principal investigators in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in early 1967. Taylor had called the meeting, and the principal item on the agenda was the networking experiment. Roberts laid out his initial plan. The idea, as he described it, was to connect all of the time-sharing computers to one another directly, over dial-up telephone lines. The networking functions would be handled by the “host” computers at each
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