1970s Telecommunications

      In this decade, the ARPANET was used primarily by the military, some of the larger companies such as IBM and universities for email. The general population was not yet connected to the system and very few people were on-line at work. The use of local area networks (LANs) became more prevalent during the 1970s. Also, the idea of an open architecture was promoted, that is networks making up the ARPANET could have any design. In later years, this concept had a tremendous impact on the growth of the ARPANET.

• Twenty-Three Nodes, 1972
  
• UUCP, 1976
  
• USENET, 1979
  

Twenty-Three Nodes, 1972

• By 1972, the ARPANET was international, with nodes in Europe at University College in London, England and the Royal Radar Establishment, in Norway.
• The number of nodes on the network was up to 23 and the trend would be for that number to double every year from then on.
• Ray Tomlinson, who worked at BBN, invented email.

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UUCP, 1976

• UUCP stands for UNIX to UNIX CoPy.
• AT&T Bell Labs which developed the UUCP.
• In 1977, UUCP was distributed with UNIX.

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USENET, 1979

• USENET stands for User Network, which was started by using UUCP to connect Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Newsgroups emerged from this, early development.

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