 Wide area networks (WANs) emerged during the 1950s and became established during the 1960s.Christopher Strachey, who became Oxford University's first professor of computation, filed a patent application for time-sharing in February 1959.In June that year, he gave a paper "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers" at the UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed the concept on to J. C. R. Licklider.