As the year closes, we lose Larry Roberts, 81, to a heart attack.

As a manager of the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, Roberts oversaw the development of Arpanet, the major forerunner to the World Wide Web. On October 29, 1969, the first message (“Login,” but only “lo” got through) went from UCLA to Stanford. Roberts later went on to work in the burgeoning computer industry.