In late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided that people needed serious motivation to get things going. In October 1972 there was to be an International Conference on Computer Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public demonstration of the ARPANET.
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.
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.)
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