First ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT, he initiated a project to build such a network. Roberts and Thomas Merrill had been researching wide area networking for computer time-sharing. At the first ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967, Roberts presented a proposal for the "ARPA net", a distributed network using Interface Message Processors to create a message switching network. At the conference, Roger Scantlebury presented Donald Davies' work on packet switching and mentioned the work of Paul Baran at RAND. Roberts incorporated their concepts into the ARPANET design and upgraded the proposed communications speed to be used from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps.