c8173d17_TIMPs

After the initial ARPANET was complete, the next major milestone was to enable access to the network regardless of one’s proximity to a host node with an IMP connection.

The idea was to allow a computer to access resources on another computer directly without connecting to a host first. This connective computer would connect to an IMP directly (but still transparently) as a ‘dumb terminal’ as with time-sharing and would not be a fully-fledged computing device. These devices would be called Terminal Information Processors (TIMPs) for this reason.

The development of TIMPs makes it clearer that the host machines on the ARPANET were not just connection and transmission nodes for their own purpose, they were loci for other non-host computers to gain access to an IMP, and thereby, the broader network. In other words computers would connect to a host which sustained a connection to an IMP.