The military’s interest in ARPANET was, of course, born out of necessity. The Cold War was in full swing, and the Pentagon was searching for ways to create communication systems that could survive even in the event of a nuclear attack. The idea was to build a network that could route around damaged nodes, ensuring that messages could still get through even if part of the system was destroyed. In hindsight, this was an incredibly forward-thinking concept, and it laid the groundwork for much of what would follow in the development of the internet.

UC Berkeley was one of the few places where you could glimpse the future, where the seeds of this revolution were being planted. The campus was a hotbed of intellectual curiosity, filled with students and professors who were pushing the boundaries of what was possible with technology. We were surrounded by discussions of quantum physics, mathematics, and, increasingly, the possibilities of computing. The students I encountered there were not just bright—they were visionaries in their own right, constantly questioning the status quo and exploring how technology could redefine the world.

In the early 1960s, I attended UC Berkeley, where my initial brush with ARPANET took place. Back then, the world of computing looked vastly different from what we know today. In fact, the term “internet” wasn’t even part of our vocabulary. What existed at that time was ARPANET, an experimental network being developed by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). It was still in its infancy, a fledgling project with grand ambitions, but the exact nature of those ambitions wasn’t entirely clear to us as students. This was a world where computing was confined to large institutions, a far cry from the personal computing revolution that was just on the horizon.