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Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

This is the Internet map a few months after I first got on from Harv-10 in 1972:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/7257339850/lightbox/ .

Brings back great memories of sitting by the Harvard IMP (router) late at night, and getting a call from BBN on the phone asking me (anyone) to reboot it manually...

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here are a bunch of other ARPANET maps from 1969-77:

http://som.csudh.edu/cis/lpress/history/arpamaps/

By the way, I (as non-US) wonder why west coast and california had more nodes even back then?

I mean, west coast is less populated and if you look at night lights map it's practically invisible compared to east coast. Why tech tend to be there anyway?

Most of the work on the ARPAnet was happening in California. Between defense contractors (one of the 'goal' clients), the number of universities (Stanford, USC, UCB, Etc.), primary contractors (SRI, BBN, Etc), and the relative low cost of slinging wires long distances through the central valley to try out protocols over long distances, it got more investment early on.

Back then it was likely easier to lay the groundwork than in more populated cities. In addition there were great institutes of higher learning focusing on technology.

Note this is just a small theory and in no way has any evidence to back it.

But then, why all those technology institutes happened to grow there? Back when there weren't many people, or infrastructure, or tech?

"Back when there weren't many people, or infrastructure"

What time frame are you thinking of here? I'm not sure it is accurate - there was plenty of infrastructure and people in post WW2 Western US.

When those technological institutions were found.

Maybe there were plenty, still I guess east coast had much more. Am I wrong?

You'd probably have to go to before WW2.

On the earlier end, Stanford, UCLA, UCSB and Berkeley all trace their roots back to 1860s-1890s.

But you'd probably have to go back to before the gold rush to go to a time when there weren't many people in the bay area: san francisco had about 1,000 people living there in 1848, 25,000 by 1849, and was the 10th most populous city in the US by 1870, and had 300,000 by 1890.

Los Angeles blew up with the discovery of oil and entertainment and broke the top 10 in the 20's and the top 5 in the 30's.

You aren't wrong, the east coast had a lot more people, but they still do today.

Both H (Bill Hewlett) and P (Dave Packard) were at Stanford prior to WW2. And Silicon Valley pre-dates the Internet era. See Fairchild Semiconductor, The Treacherous Eight, etc.

That's a good question and I'd be very interested in reading about why so many popped up out here. I posed a question about this on Quora so hopefully I can report back soon with some good answers.

Steve Blank gave a very interesting Google tech talk about it, back in 1997:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ

William Shockley is a notable contributor to the birth of Silicon Valley (along with many other factors).

"Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley

Those were just the early lucky ARPA fundees, mostly because they had excellent computer science departments (or were well-connected politically, like Harvard) or were research institutes like SRI or Rand.

Plus the usual military nodes early on, since all the ARPA grants were sponsored by the military, and they had to keep their fingers on things.

What do the two different symbols represent?

The red circles are IMPs (interface message processors--full routers connected to hosts) and the circled T's are TIPs (terminal interface processors--dialup routers).

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