1974

In early 1974 TELENET, a subsidiary company of BBN, gets connected. TELENET offers the first publicly accessible packet switched data communication service, and has been governed by Larry Roberts (used to work for ARPA before) since its founding in 1973. Thus, TELENET can be seen as a commercial ARPANET.
About the same time J.C.R. Licklider, who took over Robert’s position at ARPA/DARPA, was struggling with his former employer BBN about the publication of the IMP source code. For ARPA/DARPA they were essential for selling the ARPANET. The selling and transferring responsibility of the ARPANET respectively have been discussed years earlier already.

In the beginning, ARPA formed up to connect vital computer capacities of the leading American information technology centers, which they had accomplished long ago. In order to transfer the operation of the ARPANET to someone else, they needed the IMP source code from BBN. BBN on the other side strictly insisted on not handing out their codes, by arguing that it had always gotten altered and that they didn’t want the risk of publishing obsolete software. After ARPA threatened to transfer all contracts with BBN to other companies, BBN finally decided to hand out the source codes in 1975.