In 1969, while he was a student at UCLA working on his Ph.D in Computer Science, Jon was presented with an opportunity to work on the ARPANET project. The project was named after the agency that paid for it – the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency.
The goal of the ARPANET project was to create an online resource of networked computers referred to as the Network Information Center. This information center would maintain a directory of the network personnel at each site along with an archive of network documents that could be shared between the computers.