Project MAC
lorenetworking
The MIT time-sharing research project whose people and ideas seeded much of computer communications.
Its subject was making one computer serve many users at once, which is not networking, and it produced a generation who then built networks. That is the pattern worth noticing: the interactive computing tradition trained people to think about resource sharing, contention and fairness, and those are the problems a network has. Reading the ARPANET's early personnel is largely reading a list of people who passed through time-sharing research first.
Also known as: mac project, multiple access computer