Leonard Kleinrock of MIT published the first paper on packet switching theory in July 1961 [5]. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits—a major step toward computer networking. The other key step was to make the computers talk to each other. Exploring this idea in 1965 while working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts to the Q-32 in California through a low-speed dial-up telephone line [8], creating the first-ever (though small) wide-area computer network. The result of this experiment: confirmation that time-sharing computers could work well together, running programs and retrieving data as necessary on remote machines, but that the circuitswitched telephone system was.
