Lawrence G. (Larry) Roberts, met and was inspired by J.C.R. Licklider in 1964 to work on building a wide-area communications network. In 1965, the director of the IPTO contracted Roberts to develop a network. Thomas Marill programmed the network. In1966, Roberts and Marill published what amounted to an ARPANET plan Ð it was titled “Toward a Cooperative Network of Shared Computers.” Roberts joined ARPA in 1966 as IPTO chief scientist. He led 1967 design discussions at an ARPA meeting in Michigan at which the standards for transmission of characters, and identification and authentication of users were first described. In 1967, he presented a paper that summarized the complete ARPANET plan at an ACM symposium in Tennessee. In 1968, he wrote and completed a program plan titled “Resource Sharing Computer Networks” which was approved June 21, and work on ARPANET began. In 1969, he became director of IPTO. He wrote the first e-mail management program to list, selectively read, file, forward and respond to messages in 1972. In 1973, he became CEO of Telenet, the first packet-switching network carrier. (Pioneer/Originator.)
