Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

Today, in the former warehouse district South of Market, buildings are still full of young people, hard at work on their vision of tomorrow. They call it SoMa now. Nobody’s bumming rides—these days, the cars drive themselves. Instead of one computer, its tonnage rivaling the rooftop boiler whose installation most Project One graduates remember with equal clarity, there are computers in every pocket and on every desk. There are light bulbs South of Market smarter than the Resource One computer. The brightest minds in computer science are still here—or the most privileged, anyway—but now they’re refining algorithms to sell goods and services on a network their hippie forebears could only have imagined, long haired and pointing to the box (it’s an electronic bulletin board, they said; it’ll help us with the revolution, they said). Perhaps if the foundational myths of the city’s technology culture, which so influences the rest of the world, included things like the Social Services Referral Directory, that revolution might have had a different flavor.

  At their weekly building-wide consensus meetings, the women of Resource One were used to being talked over. Sherry and Mary remember a man who wanted to keep a gun in the building, and the drag-out debates with veto-wielding holdouts. “Making decisions by one hundred percent consensus with over a hundred people—some of whom were pretty wacky—it was tiring,” Joan says. They came up with a solution. Every time one of them was interrupted, the others would interject. They worked out the strategy ahead of time, no doubt during some long conversation on Sherry’s bed. “We would say, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t hear what so-and-so said.’ Or we would say, ‘Wait, let her finish.’ We would do that for each other,” Sherry remembers. “You’re countering dominance behavior. And sometimes all it takes to do that is to wake somebody up.”

  The Social Services Referral Directory represents one of the earliest efforts to apply computing to social good, and it reveals what happens when the process of technological design and implementation is opened up to more diverse groups of people. When the women of Resource One—radicals, feminists, and organizers all—brought their shared values to the machine, the result was a product more beneficial to their community. They took the tools being touted as world changing by male hackers and applied them locally, making them do good in the here and now. It remains a radical idea, and it wasn’t the first time that women brought such a strong concern for use to technology: pioneers like Grace Hopper and Betty Holberton, working to refine and systematize programming languages, made their craft accessible to a broader public, opening doors for even nonprogrammers to understand what computers make possible. And it would soon happen again—and again, and again—as the interconnection of computers gave women new openings to pioneer emerging fields. In the process, they’d help us all to make sense of the information age.

  Chapter Eight

  NETWORKS

  I’m waiting for the airport bus in Marin and the rain shows no sign of stopping. I can’t stop thinking about Resource One and their SDS-940. I try to imagine what it would be like to have a computer like that in my house. It had only a 64k memory—many orders of magnitude less than the phone in my pocket, which I’ve been known to drop unceremoniously, and have even run through the washing machine once—but I realize I’m totally jealous of Resource One. They had the computer before it got so complicated. The SDS-940 was freestanding, tethered only to a few terminals across the bay: more furniture than accessory. From San Francisco, I fly home to Los Angeles, gratefully toggling my devices into airplane mode for an hour-long respite from their constant notifications.

  Computers began to be strung together at the end of the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s—as the women of Resource One were distributing their referral directory around the Bay Area and the Community Memory terminal was introducing the longhairs to the joys of electronic bulletin boards—that a skeletal version of the Internet as we know it started taking shape. At more than a dozen sites in the United States, half of which were in California, refrigerator-sized mainframes like the SDS-940 were being wired together through phone lines and routers to share resources, time, and communications. This proto-Internet, the ARPANET, was funded by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its goals weren’t social—not until e-mail came along—but rather resource sharing. Before the ARPANET, anyone who wanted to transfer data from one computer to another did so with a stack of punched cards or a roll of magnetic tape, and people still moved more fluidly than data. As one historian points out, before computers became accessible remotely, “a scientist who needed to use a distant computer might find it easier to get on a plane and fly to the machine’s location to use it in person.” The ARPANET, by linking a group of useful “distant computers” together, changed all that. With network access, a scientist at MIT could run programs on a machine in California just as easily as if they were in the room punching the keys themselves.

  The ARPANET was a packet-switching network, as the Internet remains today: by breaking information into bite-size “packets” and sending it across the network in measured hops, the ARPANET insured itself against system-wide failure. If any node along the network were to go down, the packets could easily reroute themselves before reassembling upon arrival. The ARPANET’s earliest users were its builders: mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers at places like Bolt, Beranek and Newman, where Pat Crowther printed her cave maps and Will Crowther wrote router code; MIT; Carnegie Mellon; UCLA; and, up in Northern California, Berkeley, Stanford, and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. These people all contributed to designing the early Internet, suggesting new protocols, fixing bugs, and adding features as they went. Because the military and the highest echelons of academic computer science were so male dominated, it stands to reason that all these people, the first users of the Internet, were college-educated men.

  Except, of course, they weren’t.

  A GIRL NAMED JAKE

  She wore her hair combed back, parted far on the left, and chose a smart business suit for her first day on the job. She even wore heels. But when she walked into the Augmentation Research Center lab at the Stanford Research Institute, she still stuck out like a sore thumb. It was 1972, and these were the magnificent men: their hair as long and wild as their unkempt beards, sitting in beanbags, “looking kind of like unmade beds.” Those who had desk chairs rolled around on the bare floor of the giant open office they called the bullpen, loud as pinballs, checking in with one another with no discernible hierarchy. Her name was Elizabeth Feinler, but everyone back home in West Virginia called her Jake.

  Jake wondered what the hell she was getting herself into.

  Jake was the first in her family to graduate from college. While doing graduate work at Purdue, she was so poor that she’d eat the wild squirrels her boyfriends hunted, and buy cast-off chickens from food department science experiments for five cents a pop. She found her way to Stanford through a circuitous path: after studying chemistry, she’d taken a job as an information chemist at an abstracts service in Columbus, collating scientific papers and patents into a massive repository of chemical information, one of the largest data collections in the world. She was intrigued by the sheer volume of information, and the seemingly Sisyphean task of organizing it into a useful database. Realizing she was more interested in information itself than in chemistry, she took a job at Stanford helping scholars with technical research—gathering reprints and running around to different libraries before summarizing her findings on index cards, much as a search engine works today.

  At Stanford, Jake worked in a basement lab. It wasn’t long before an upstairs neighbor, Douglas Engelbart, began popping down to her office for organizational advice. Engelbart had invented a computer system called NLS (oNLine System) in the late 1960s, a predecessor to the modern personal computer in both form and philosophy, and the first system to incorporate a mouse and a keyboard into its design. NLS was so visionary that the first time Engelbart presented it in public is g
enerally known in tech history as “the Mother of all Demos.” At the Augmentation Research Center, the lab above Jake’s Stanford office, Engelbart’s team of engineers and computer science researchers were busy imagining the future. “He would come down and say, ‘What are you doing?’” Jake remembers. “And I’d say, ‘What are all those people doing upstairs, staring at television sets?’”

  Whatever it was, it made technical research look boring. One day, when Engelbart came down to visit her office, Jake asked him for a job. He told her he didn’t have one, but he kept her in mind and, six months later, he came back. “I have a job now,” he announced. It had nothing to do with index cards; instead, Douglas Engelbart introduced Jake Feinler to the wild new world of networked computing. Her life would never be the same.

  In the fall of 1969, one of Engelbart’s machines had been on the receiving end of the first transmission between two host computers on the ARPANET. The connection crashed halfway through, truncating that very first Internet message from LOGIN to the somewhat more prophetic LO. By 1972, when Jake joined Engelbart’s team, Stanford was one of thirty-odd nodes on the growing national ARPANET; it was also home to the Network Information Center, the NIC, a central office for ARPANET affairs (everyone involved in the ARPANET in those days calls it “the Nick,” like the name of an old friend with a reputation). Engelbart offered Jake the NIC, and told her the office needed to produce a Resource Handbook for the ARPANET in time for an important demonstration to the Department of Defense. “I said, ‘What’s a Resource Handbook?’ And he says, ‘Honestly, I don’t know, but we need one in six weeks.’”

  Jake figured it out. Because the ARPANET was initially built as a resource-sharing network for scientists, the handbook was supposed to list which machines, programs, and personnel were available to them at the various sites on the network. “It was pretty obvious what I had to do,” Jake remembers. To put together the handbook, Jake made contact with every single host site on the nascent Internet—calling up technical liaisons and administrators across the country—to document exactly what they had available. Every host site was different. Colleges and universities used their host computers for all manner of things; for some, the fact that their machine was “online” was incidental. For others, it was tantamount. The host computers weren’t always stable. At MIT, “the kids ran the machine,” Jake remembers, and undergraduates, hip to the “best game in town,” often sneaked onto the network at night to mess around. Despite these challenges, the Resource Handbook that Jake’s office produced became the first documentation of the Internet’s technical infrastructure; weighing in at one thousand pages, it was a record of every node, institution, and person keeping the ARPANET running.

  Putting the Resource Handbook together made Jake an instant authority on the ARPANET, and she eventually built the Network Information Center from a two-person operation to an eleven-million-dollar project, taking on all the major organizational responsibilities of the growing network. Working with a largely female staff, she created the ARPANET Directory, comprising, along with the Resource Handbook, the “electronic yellow and white pages” of the early Internet. In addition, she managed the registry for all new hosts, indexed the most important conversations on the network, ran the NIC’s Reference Desk—a hotline for the Internet that rang day in and day out—and suggested protocols that remain core utilities of the Internet to this day.

  This didn’t all happen at once. After all, when Jake started at Stanford, the ARPANET was still relatively small. “We just tootled along in the background for a while,” Jake explained, “until suddenly the network began expanding like crazy.” As the ARPANET grew, Jake’s team was responsible for keeping it organized. In 1974, the NIC took over maintaining the ARPANET’s registry, the “Host Table.” Every time a new institution wanted to join the network, it first needed to contact Jake’s office to make sure their host name wasn’t already taken and that their hardware met network guidelines. The NIC’s Host Table kept the Internet running, and long before commercial outfits like GoDaddy and Network Solutions controlled the administration of Internet addresses, Jake, the well-coiffed West Virginian with a chemistry degree—out of place but having fun among the hippies and the hackers—was air traffic control, head librarian, and manager of the Internet all rolled into one.

  Jake Feinler in her office at the Network Information Center

  Jake was one of only a few women involved with the ARPANET. Because it was funded by the military and built by engineers at the highest levels of academic research, the technical side of the network was dominated by men. Women arrived on the scene sideways: before Jake, a few found their way into computer networking through information science (Ellen Westheimer, who worked at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Massachusetts firm that designed the ARPANET’s first routers, published an early version of the Host Table, and Peggy Karp at the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts, first suggested standardizing it), and Jake’s female peers at the NIC came from all over. Mary Stahl, a fellow West Virginian who’d married Jake’s half brother, came on as a research associate in the early days; she had an art degree and had previously taught painting to children. One of the NIC’s staff programmers, Ken Harrenstein, was deaf, and his sign-language interpreters, who were almost exclusively women, pulled double duty doing data entry for the NIC databases; none had technical backgrounds, and all learned on the fly. Their contributions to networking weren’t technological so much as they were organizational. “There weren’t many women who were programmers in those days, and many of the people working on networking had degrees in engineering, they’d come up through electrical engineering or physics,” Jake says, “but women are very good at handling information, because they’re very good with detail.”

  Still, they were outliers. Jake remembers being asked to make coffee in a meeting with military higher-ups, and the first time she sat down to work at one of the NLS terminals in the lab, “somebody came and yelled at me, and said, ‘Secretaries aren’t supposed to be using the machines.’” Such experiences shot her self-confidence. “I was sure that there was some huge plug in the sky that only I was going to trash,” she worried. In due course, she worked out her strategies. Asked to make coffee, she glibly responded, “Oh I’d be glad to make it this time—maybe you’ll make it the next time?” As for her fears of trashing the machine, she eventually realized that Engelbart’s complex system was far more daunting to Department of Defense brass than it would have been to a secretary, or any woman accustomed to working with keyboards. “It was harder to get higher-ups to touch them,” she discovered, “because they were afraid they would look foolish.”

  Just as previous generations of human computers working together embodied the network to come, the early Internet’s female information scientists embodied another function that would eventually be taken over by the system itself: search. Long before the search engines we now take for granted existed, the NIC was the Google of its day, and Jake its human algorithm, the one person who knew exactly where everything was kept. Without the NIC’s services, it was nearly impossible to navigate the ARPANET; host sites didn’t advertise their resources, which were often in flux as machines and configurations changed. This left new users little to work with and put the burden of management on Jake’s office. “If you didn’t know where else to go,” she said, “you came to the NIC.” Her phones rang off the hook for twenty years, and as soon as e-mail became a feature of the network, she was drowned in it. She had nightmares that she’d miss something important in the deluge. “It was just unending. E-mail was my cross to bear.”

  Jake picked up everything that wasn’t held down—her friends joked that she never met a piece of paper she didn’t like—and brought it to the NIC for safekeeping and reference. As a result, her office was full of books and papers, and her desk was a briar of loose-leaf piles so messy that one of Jake’s employees once hired a cleaning person to tackle the mess. “That was the only
time I ever got mad at someone that worked for me. I said, ‘You can clean your office all you want but don’t touch mine,’” she remembers. Jake’s piles, disordered as they may have seemed, were a mental index of the goings-on of the Internet as a whole—and Jake, their chief curator and custodian.

  The NIC’s role in managing the ARPANET’s information flow is easier to overlook than that of its builders. When information runs smoothly, after all, it can feel as natural as air. But it took a huge amount of labor to keep the NIC, and the network, operational. Jake shares a joke they told around the office, about an everyman named Joe Smith. Everybody knows Joe Smith, she explains: this person knows Joe, that other person knows Joe, too. Even the president knows him. One day Joe Smith is at the Vatican and somebody in the crowd says, “Who’s that up there?” Someone else responds, “I don’t know the one in the red beanie, but the other one’s Joe Smith.” Jake was the Internet’s Joe Smith, she explains: totally anonymous and totally ubiquitous at once. At a certain point, she began to remove her own name from correspondence, because it just felt “ridiculous.” I ask Jake when she first realized that the Internet would grow large enough to make her job impossible, and she doesn’t hesitate. “That was almost from the beginning,” she says. “I used to think, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

  The Augmentation Research Center lab went all night. The computers’ capacities were as puny as the machines were giant, and it could take hours to compile a program, especially when the network was full of time-sharing users. To speed things up, researchers worked rolling twenty-four-hour shifts, running major database updates in the middle of the night, chugging coffee, Coke, and Mountain Dew to make it through to sunrise. “We were just trying to build things, get things done,” says Jake, “and the machines were so crowded you couldn’t do it during the day, so there was a whole cadre of people that were on the network at night trying to get work done.” Sometimes they’d slump over at their desks, falling asleep directly over the terminals, but Jake and the women of the NIC retreated to the ladies’ room to rest. “There was a couch in there,” she explained, in an anteroom. “It was a law then—they had to have couches for women.”