Router

A router is a computer networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks, including the internetworks that make up the global Internet, by reading the destination address in each packet and consulting a routing table to decide where to send it next. Donald Davies proposed the underlying switching-node concept for Britain's NPL network in 1966, and Wesley Clark independently proposed a similar device for ARPANET in 1967, where such machines were built and named Interface Message Processors; the first was built at the National Physical Laboratory in early 1969, and IMPs built from Honeywell 516 computers were installed at UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah later that year. Virginia Travers of BBN Technologies built the first true IP router in 1975 and 1976 under a DARPA program, and the multiprotocol router able to speak more than one networking protocol was developed independently in 1981 by teams at MIT under Noel Chiappa and at Stanford under William Yeager.