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In 1958, ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was dubbed “a dead cat hanging in the fruit closet”. All the interesting projects had been transferred to its newer, more fashionable rival, NASA. And yet the dead cat turned out to have an extra life: ARPA commissioned and created a way for any computer in the world to contact any other computer in the world. As Tim Harford explains, the ARPAnet was the forerunner of today’s Internet – and the heart of the ARPAnet was a massive, heavily armoured piece of kit that set the stage for how the internet works: The Interface Message Processor, the most important hunk of silicon you’ve never heard of. Producer: Ben Crighton Editor: Richard Vadon