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The history of the Internet has its origin in information theory and the efforts to build and interconnect computer networks that arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
Fundamental theoretical work on information theory was developed by Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley in the 1920s. Information theory, as enunciated by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, provided a firm theoretical underpinning to understand the tradeoffs between signal-to-noise ratios, bandwidth and error-free transmission in the presence of noise in telecommunications technology. This was one of the three key developments, along with advances in transistor technology and laser technology, that made possible the rapid growth of telecommunication bandwidth over the next half-century.
Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. Independently, Paul Baran proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s, and Donald Davies conceived of packet switching in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory , proposing a national commercial data network in the UK.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. ARPANET adopted the packet switching technology proposed by Davies and Baran, underpinned by mathematical work in the early 1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA. The network was built by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman.