Early Packet-Switching and ARPANET Pioneers

This group gathers pioneers of computer networking whose primary contribution was the earliest packet-switched networks that led to the Internet, including ARPANET itself and its Interface Message Processors, early research networks such as CSNET, BITNET and NSFNET, early interactive networked computing at sites such as UC Santa Barbara, store-and-forward networks such as FidoNet, and early non-US packet networks such as Bell Labs Datakit and the French X.25 data networking effort. Their shared work is building or operating one of the small number of foundational packet-switched networks before the Internet reached its modern global form, as distinct from designing the protocols those networks came to share, which belongs to Internet Protocols and Routing, or building the standards and governance bodies that coordinated them afterward, which belongs to Internet Governance and Standards.