The original internet was meant for scientists to exchange data sets . What are data sets ?

In the late 1970s, it was possible for faculty and military to use a modem to connect a Personal Computer to the University or Military Base’s computer network or school library or science departments over the telephone.

About that time, or maybe a little after (early 1980s) Academic institutions and the Military and research corporations started to exchange information over the telephone lines through the use of telephone modems. I guess fax machines started to appear about this time as well.

This developed into the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network )—the precurser to the Internet of 1989 . The ARPANET was an early packet switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

The packet switching methodology employed in the ARPANET was based on concepts and designs by Americans Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies, and Lawrence Roberts. The TCP/IP communications protocols were developed for the ARPANET by computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, and incorporated concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin.

As the project progressed, protocols for internetworking were developed by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.

I remember doing a university project and my advisor told to go see a person in the science and technologies area for access to TCP/IP at another university 400 miles away on DARPANET in 1975. They had the data sets (complex data) for my paper and project.
The connection was 300 baud on a dial-up phone.

Glad to know it was available as early as 1975.

My father was a Technical Institute professor and Naval Officer trainer—I remember him using a Modem but wasn’t aware the ARPANET was available that early.

@Yellowdog my advisor had used it 5 years early while getting their advance degree. It was called ARPANET then.

Nothing new to add here, then, At some point it was possible to transfer information on computer data bases over the telephone and share/exchange information. I first became aware of Personal Computers around 1977 when I was 12 or 13 years old—and that it was then possible to exchange data over the phone from a database to your PC.

Evidently the military or research facilities were doing this very early—sharing research and the contents of their databases.

A dataset is an organized collection of records.

Say you wanted to study the effects of weather on wheat crops in the past 50 years.

You could ask the weather service for their daily records of temperature, precipitation and cloud cover. That’s a dataset.

You could ask the agricultural bureau for their records of acres planted, varieties of wheat, and yields. That is also a dataset.

You want electronic records, not paper ones you would have to re-type into your computer.

Being on a computer network makes it easy to transmit the records, rather than having to mail a disk or tape or (these days) a flash drive.

Excellent answer, @Call_Me_Jay, and you’re the only one who actually answered the question!