Roberts, of the significance of networking. After informal conversations with Licklider at the Second Congress on Information System Sciences in Hot Springs, Virginia, in November 1964, Roberts "concluded that the most important problem in the computer field before us at the time was computer networking; the ability to access one computer from another easily and economically to permit resource sharing." Roberts recalled, "That was a topic in which Licklider was very interested and his enthusiasm infected me." (Hauben, 1995).
Licklidcomputer science. It also was an important beginning to the ARPANET, and later, the Internet. Taylor commented on Licklider's ideas:.
"Lick was among the first to perceive the spirit of community.
created among the users of the first time-sharing systems. .
In pointing out the community phenomena created, in part, by .
the sharing of resources in one timesharing system, Lick made .
it easy to think about interconnecting the communities, the interconnection of interactive, online communities .
.
A crucial challenge that the IPTO faced was to devise a system where computers across the country could send information to each other, even though each command node might have different types of computers using very different operating systems. Also, there was the military's need for strategic communication during a nuclear strike. America needed a command and control network, linked from state to state, city to city, base to base. But no matter how meticulously that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. Also, how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central fortification, or any ICBM site, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile or bombing run. Work on a networking theory called packet switching turned out to be the key to this puzzle.
