A brief look from 1997: Annual percentage growth rate of data traffic on undersea telephone cables: 90 Number of miles of undersea telephone cables: 186,000  Source: WinTreese
1957: Sputnik has launched ARPA   President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the need for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik. 1957 - October 4th - the USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. 1958 - February 7th - In response to the launch of Sputnik, the US Department of Defense issues directive 5105.15 establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The organization united some of America's most brilliant people, who developed the United States' first successful satellite in 18 months. Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking and communications technology. In 1962, Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head ARPA's research in improving the military's use of computer technology. Licklider was a visionary who sought to make the government's use of computers more interactive. To quickly expand technology, Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts from the private sector to universities and laid the foundations for what would become the ARPANET. The Atlantic cable of 1858 and Sputnik of 1957 were two basic  milestone of the Internet prehistory. You might want also to take a look on  the Telecommunications and Computers preHistory The Internet as a  tool to create "critical mass" of  intellectual resources  To appreciate the import ante the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of "critical mass," as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another. But bring these people together physically in one place to form a team, and you have trouble, for the most creative people are often not the best team players, and there are not enough top positions in a single organization to keep them all happy. Let them go their separate ways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and devotes more time to the role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The principals still get together at meetings. They still visit one another. But the time scale of their communication stretches out, and the correlations among mental models degenerate between meetings so that it may take a year to do a week’s communicating. There has to be some way of facilitating communicantion among people wit bout bringing them together in one place. The Computer as a Communication Device by  J.C.R. Licklider, Robert W. Taylor, Science and Technology, April 1968. Online republish by Systems Research Center of DEC, p.29
The first visible results of Licklider's approach comes shortly   1969: The first LOGs: UCLA -- Stanford According toVinton Cerf: ...the UCLA people proposed to DARPA to organize and run a Network Measurement Center for the ARPANET project... Around Labor Day in 1969, BBN delivered an Interface Message Processor (IMP) to UCLA that was based on a Honeywell DDP 516, and when they turned it on, it just started running. It was hooked by 50 Kbps circuits to two other sites (SRI and UCSB) in the four-node network: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
	The plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data.They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor.
	"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI...," Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the phone, "Do you see the L?" "Yes, we see the L," came the response. "We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O." "Yes, we see the O." "Then we typed the G, and the system crashed"... Yet a revolution had begun"...

It took Bob about a year to get everybody far enough along to demonstrate a bunch of applications on the ARPANET. The idea was that we would install a packet switch and a Terminal Interface Processor or TIP in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel, and actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ....

The demo was a roaring success, much to the surprise of the people at AT&T who were skeptical about whether it would work.

Source: Vinton Cerf

About one - two years after the first online demo of  how "actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ...." (Vinton Cerf) the NET became  really   busy  especially "every Friday night" (Bob Bell)

Around about 1973 - 1975 I maintained PDP 10 hardware at SRI.

I remember hearing that there was an ARPANET "conference" on the Star Trek game every Friday night. Star Trek was a text based game where you used photon torpedos and phasers to blast Klingons.

I used to have a pretty cool logical map of the ARPANET at the time but my ex-wife got it. (She got everything but the debts.)

Bob Bell
DEC Field Service

	It seems we  found   "a pretty cool logical map of the ARPANET" which Bob has kindly reminded us about . Thanks, Bob!
	Logical map of the ARPANET, April 1971

1958 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) created by Department of Defense (DoD). 1961 Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) assigns a Command and Control Project to ARPA. 1962 Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) formed to coordinate ARPA's command and control research. 1972 ARPA renamed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 1986 The technical scope of IPTO expands and it becomes the Information Science and Technology Office (ISTO). 1991 ISTO splits into the Computing Systems Technology Office (CSTO) and the Software and Intelligent Systems Office
By Charles Babbage Institute Center For the History of Information Processing
University of Minnesota

The Roads That Were Built By Ike . . "I like Ike" was an irressistible slogan in 1952. About half century later, there are reasons  "to like Ike" even more ... Many people don't realize that there is more than a metaphor which connects the "Information Superhighway" with the Interstate Highway System In 1957, while responding to the threat of the Soviets in general and the success of Sputnik in particular, President Dwight Eisenhower created both the Interstate Highway System and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. .by Steve Driscoll,   Online Computer Library Center Inc. Information Superhighway: what exactly does it mean? In Europe: "A term often used by the media to describe the Internet." by The Internet Dictionary , Bradford, England In USA there are  lots of different meanings: Information Superhighway/Infobahn: The terms were coined to describe a possible upgrade to the existing Internet through the use of fiber optic and/or coaxial cable to allow for high speed data transmission. This highway does not exist - the Internet of today is not an information superhighway. by  Internet Glossary , SquareOne Technology . information superhighway or I-way - this is a buzzword from a speech by Vice President Al Gore that refers to the Clinton/Gore administration's plan to deregulate communication services and widen the scope of the Internet by opening carriers, such as television cable, to data communication. The term is widely used to mean the Internet, also referred to as the infobahn (I-bahn). by  Online Dictionary , NetLingo Confusing, isn't it? Fortunately  Nice Lady kindly agreed  to clarify the root source:

 

Tipper Gore:"When my husband Vice President Gore served in the House of Representatives, he coined the phrase "information superhighway" to describe how this exciting new medium would one day transport us all. Since then, we have seen the Internet and World Wide Web revolutionize the way people interact, learn, and communicate."

Photo of Tipper and Al Gore wedding: 20-th year BW (Before Web)

Gore has become the point man in the Clinton administration's effort to build a national information highway much as his father, former Senator Albert Gore, was a principal architect of the interstate highway system a generation or more earlier. Principal Figures in the Development of the Internet ... The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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24 Jun 1986:  Albert Gore (D-TN) introduce S 2594 Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 21 March 1994:  Gore's Buenos Aires Speech International Telecommunications Union: "By means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time ... The round globe is a vast ... brain, instinct with intelligence!" This was not the observation of a physicist--or a neurologist. Instead, these visionary words were written in 1851 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of my country's greatest writers, who was inspired by the development of the telegraph. Much as Jules Verne foresaw submarines and moon landings, Hawthorne foresaw what we are now poised to bring into being... ... I opened by quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne, inspired by Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph. Morse was also a famous portrait artist in the U.S.--his portrait of President James Monroe hangs today in the White House. While Morse was working on a portrait of General Lafayette in Washington, his wife, who lived about 500 kilometers away, grew ill and died. But it took seven days for the news to reach him. In his grief and remorse, he began to wonder if it were possible to erase barriers of time and space, so that no one would be unable to reach a loved one in time of need. Pursuing this thought, he came to discover how to use electricity to convey messages, and so he invented the telegraph and, indirectly, the ITU."

	Telegraph, Telephone, Radio Timeline
See also:	The Birth of the ARPANET DARPA-Internet History Internet Timeline: 1836 - 1997