ARPAnet In the late 1960s--when the U.S. military was desperately afraid of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union--some government computer scientists in the Advanced Research Projects Agency got together to design a bomb-proof network that would connect military bases and other military agencies. To do so, they created a system based on linking distant computers via a newly developed set of protocols called TCP/IP. This new nuke-proof network (though it was never tested with real nukes, of course) became ARPAnet. In the early 1980s, ARPAnet technology was put to use for nonmilitary purposes and gradually became what we now call the Internet. ARPAnet was taken out of commission in favor of a higher-speed network called NSFNET in 1990. See also: TCP/IP