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In 1958, ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was dubbed 鈥渁 dead cat hanging in the fruit closet鈥�. All the interesting projects had been transferred to its newer, more fashionable rival, NASA. And yet the dead cat turned out to have an extra life: ARPA commissioned and created a way for any computer in the world to contact any other computer in the world. As Tim Harford explains, the ARPAnet was the forerunner of today鈥檚 Internet 鈥� and the heart of the ARPAnet was a massive, heavily armoured piece of kit that set the stage for how the internet works: The Interface Message Processor, the most important hunk of silicon you鈥檝e never heard of.

Producer: Ben Crighton
Editor: Richard Vadon