Has Hal Signed a Contract: The Statute of Frauds in Cyberspace
Richard Allan Horning · Santa Clara Law Digital Commons (Santa Clara University) · 1996
Articles about the rise of the Internet,' "surfing the Net," "electronic coffee houses," computer bulletin boards and the World Wide Web occupy many-column inches of ink on paper.To businesses, the prospect of contracting in cyberspace 2 seems an alluring one, and very 1.The Internet has its origins in the work of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.ARPA, later DARPA, commissioned MIT's Lincoln Laboratory to study computer networking.Lincoln Lab's work resulted in the 1965 report "A Cooperative Network of Time-Sharing Computers," establishing the basic concepts of computer linking.Later, in December 1968, Bolt Beranek and Newman was awarded an ARPA contract to undertake the actual design of a network later named ARPANet.In September 1969 the first links were established between computers located at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (later SRI International), University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah, The first public demonstration of ARPANet vas at the International Conference of Computers and Communications held in Washington, DC in October 1972.In 1985-86 the National Science Foundation became interested in proliferating the use of computer communications among colleges and universities, and NSFNet was formed as a backbone for computer communications.The Department of Defense abandoned ARPANet in 1990, and in its place NSFNet and other public agency networks have become the principal backbone of the Internet.See generally, Jeffrey A. Hart et al.