Much as Grace Hopper thrived under pressure in Howard Aiken’s Harvard lab during World War II, Jake pulled all-nighters with the best of them. “Sometimes I worked all night long, and then came and worked all day long. It was a little hairy at five in the morning,” she says. The NIC’s phone lines went live at five, to catch the East Coast callers, and stayed open until midnight, and although there was only one phone when Jake arrived, by the time she left in 1989, the NIC had a bank of six, ringing off the hook with queries from around the country. It was a central hotline for the Internet: Jake’s Reference Desk staff redirected callers to whomever was best qualified to answer their question, read back from lists of frequently asked questions, or else pulled information from the NIC’s growing library of documentation. Still, it was never enough to keep up with demand.
Jake used the ARPANET itself to stay on top of network business. Using her networked terminal, she connected with colleagues across the lab—through screen-based chatting they called “linking”—and at sites across the country, often talking to people she’d never met in the flesh. She joined technical conversations on the Request for Comments (RFC), an ongoing interoffice memo authored collectively by researchers across the ARPANET. Although the first RFCs were print memos, once the NIC put them online, they became a shared hangout, much like a bulletin board. As the importance of the RFCs became clear, Jake, her colleague Joyce Reynolds, and a group of ARPANET researchers calling themselves the Network Working Group edited them into the Internet’s official technical notes, defining conventions that we still use today. The RFCs are relics of a time when the Internet was still small enough that nearly everyone online could be involved in a single conversation. This, of course, quickly became impossible, but it’s to this sprawl—to this refractory, intractable explosion of information, connections, and people—that Jake made her most significant contributions.
None of this left much room for anything else. Jake had a hard time keeping continuity with friends outside of work, especially as the NIC’s operations grew and she began to travel nonstop, coordinating ARPANET activities between Washington and its most important host sites around the country. Like many women in computing at the time, there was no question of trying to balance a personal life with her career. “I always meant to get married,” she says, “but I never got around to it.” Still, there was nothing quite like going out for pancakes at five in the morning after a long night in the lab, or piling into a banquette at a Chinese restaurant with a bunch of hackers to argue over who had the best pot stickers—East Coast or West. When she was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, she recognized how her tenacity and luck had landed her somewhere special, at a truly pivotal moment in history. “The Internet was more fun than a barrel of monkeys,” she said. “Having fallen in at an early stage, I had more fun than I ever thought I would ever have.” To celebrate network milestones—the first hundred hosts, the successful switch from one protocol to another—they’d throw parties in the conference room. Once, at the height of the spring season, Jake brought crabs and fresh asparagus for everyone at the NIC. “She wanted to have a crab feast,” says Mary Stahl with a laugh.
“It was like my family,” remembers Jake.
WHOIS JAKE FEINLER?
Jake’s projects at the NIC had a knack for becoming essential. With the early ARPANET just a collection of host addresses managed by different people across the country, the NIC’s Resource Handbook was, in a very real sense, the only tool for navigation. It may have been printed on paper, but it was the first Internet browser. And the ARPANET Directory, Jake’s “yellow pages” of the Internet, prefigured by decades our age of searchable, reachable online social connections. Both of these simple, forward-thinking utilities would eventually become part of the ARPANET, folding the role of the NIC into the network itself. Like Grace Hopper with her automatic programming, Jake replaced herself with a machine.
As the ARPANET Directory—the Internet’s yellow pages—grew alongside the network, Jake made important decisions about how it should be handled. One was philosophical: because the early Internet community was such an odd mix of military people, computer scientists, and the occasional undergrad interloper, Jake insisted that only names, never formal titles, be included in the directory. Keeping all the military rankings straight was a headache, and more important, the 1970s were turbulent times—this is the same era that the communards were claiming a People’s Computer at Project One. On the ARPANET, “a kid hacker would be talking to a Nobel Prize winner, and somebody that had been an anti-Vietnam ‘protestor’ would be talking to military guys that had just come back.” Keeping affiliations out of the yellow pages leveled everyone’s footing, establishing a convivial, egalitarian spirit to the Internet that stuck for decades, and allowed for the development of community over distance.
Once the paper directory grew too large to update, Jake decided to build a people finder into the network itself. She established a new server at NIC called WHOIS. “WHOIS was probably one of our biggest servers,” she explained. “We stopped putting out the directory, which was essentially the network phone book, and we put all that information under WHOIS. So you could say ‘WHOIS Jake Feinler,’ and it would come back and give you my name, address, e-mail address, affiliation on the net, that kind of thing.” It was the original user profile. NIC staff kept the WHOIS database up-to-date with current contact information, enabling people to find one another online. WHOIS still exists: it’s evolved over the last forty years, but it remains a core Internet program, tracking “WHOIS” responsible for any given domain, site, or service. This helps us to keep tabs on who controls what resources online, a utility that grows in significance as sources of information seem to recede ever further into deliberate obscurity. WHOIS does nothing less than keep the Internet democratic, as one policy expert notes.
The same thing happened with the Host Table. When Jake’s office at the Network Information Center took responsibility for keeping and administering the ARPANET’s central registry in 1974, it was just a text file: a flat, ASCII document listing the names and numerical addresses of every machine on the ARPANET, which hosts downloaded directly from the NIC. But as the network grew, the number of hosts threatened to exceed the space allotted in the Host Table, and the file itself grew too large for some smaller hosts to handle. Not all sites submitted accurate information to the NIC, either, and Jake’s colleague Mary Stahl, who worked her way up from research assistant to Host Master, describes manually proofing and editing the hundreds of Host Table addresses twice a week as “a burn-out job,” and an unrewarding one at that. “Nobody said, ‘Oh great job, great Host Table,’” she says, and laughs. “It was always what’s wrong.” By the early 1980s, it was obvious that the “cumbersome and inefficient” system of maintaining a centralized Host Table was never going to improve.
The RFCs exploded with chatter about alternative systems for keeping track of all the hosts on the network. Most agreed that the new system should be hierarchical; although it seemed to be in the Internet’s nature to grow in a decentralized way, it was clear to most that a sensible naming and addressing system would be essential in keeping it from descending into chaos. The community settled on a system of nation-states: they’d divide hosts into separate realms, or “domains.” How hosts organized themselves within each domain was up to them, as long as they hewed to a standard addressing format, which should be familiar to anyone online today: host addresses would read host.domain, and users at each host would identify themselves as [email protected], the online equivalent of a mailing address with a zip code. But what would these domains be called? Jake suggested dividing them into generic categories, based on where the computers were kept: military hosts could have .mil, educational hosts .edu, government hosts .gov, organizations .org, and so forth. Commercial entities weren’t part of the Internet yet, but to fill it out, Jake and her colleagues debated between .bus, for business, and .com for commercial. Ja
ke favored .bus, but there were some hardware components that used the word. They settled on .com. That we use this domain most of all today should say something about what the network has become.
Jake wasn’t a computer scientist in the academic sense, but she understood how to make sense of complex systems, and her practical contributions to the Internet all relate to building an organizational structure to give the system the best possible chance at holding together amid rapid and unstructured growth. She hired and trained a coterie of women, who worked overtime to make sure the network’s core navigational tools—its manual, address book, and map—were up-to-date and accurate. In those early days, it was hugely exciting to share computing resources over a network, but with the interrelation of academic and military interests, people’s natural inclination to use the Internet for social purposes, and the sheer complexity of keeping the new system online, that excitement could have very easily boiled over. Jake spent her entire career keeping the young Internet tidy, labeled, and in check; without the NIC, it very well may not have worked.
The Internet is a funny thing. Then and now, it has been a thing: an infrastructural backbone of immeasurable complexity, a scaffolding over modern life that has grown stronger than the building itself, which seems to have crumbled under its weight. And yet despite its inherent physicality—the routers, the interchanges, the telephone poles strung with wires, and the fiber optic cables crossing the sea—we persist in our belief that the Internet is inchoate, a cloud. The phenomenon can be traced back to its origins, to Jake’s time. The hardware was built for a purpose, to share computing resources across universities and labs. But the Internet as a communications medium practically willed itself into being, transforming the computer from a calculator to a box full of voices. Jake, catching up on e-mails from the very beginning, could only perceive the future as it was: an information age. And information, as they say, is power.
In some quarters, the NIC’s influence was seen as threatening, and was even contested. “I think there was a lot of bad feeling,” Mary Stahl tells me, “about the fact that the NIC had this power. We were the source of the data.” Some in the ARPANET technical community pushed back against its role as the central repository for all the network’s most important documents: “They didn’t want the NIC to be the be-all and end-all, because we were not the technical people.”
The emergence of such power is beginning to feel familiar. What the NIC did at first was, ostensibly, administrative: the secretarial afterthought of putting the ARPANET’s newly available computing resources down on paper to please its funders, and then maintaining a record of its coordinates and contacts. That information itself would take on such an outsized importance, becoming the de facto currency of the networked century, was as unanticipated as the world-changing art of programming had been a generation before. Here again were women elevating the mundane, identifying the missing human component of a complex technological undertaking. It’s a little like Jake’s revelation about those military men who’d never touched a keyboard before: nobody knows the system better than the operators, the librarians, and the secretaries. “The main purpose of the Internet was to push information across it,” Jake says. “So there had to be somebody who was organizing the information.” Who else but the women who were already there, answering the one phone number everybody knew by heart?
RADIA
There are different kinds of information or, rather, different levels of specificity over it. Jake dealt in the granular: the people, places, and things of the ARPANET. Near the end of our conversation, she tells me about the people she believed had the most influence over the young network. There were the engineers, of course, and then there were people like her, from totally different backgrounds, who handled the information side. And then there were the people who, early on, emphasized the importance of “coming up with the best suite of protocols to handle the traffic. In other words, designing the network itself.” When she mentions this, I wonder if she’s thinking of a woman she knows—a woman she met way back in the NIC days, on a visit to another ARPANET host site. I wonder if she’s thinking of Radia Perlman.
Just when Jake Feinler was thinking of retiring, Radia Perlman was gearing up to supercharge the network’s capacity to reach across the world. Like Jake, she would spend her career devising simple solutions to functionally complex problems, solutions that could scale alongside the growth of the network. Radia, who wears her long gray hair parted straight down the middle and speaks with a beatific, smiling calm, really hates it when people call her the “Mother of the Internet.” Still, she can’t seem to shake the title. Radia, like a lady radio.
In the early ’70s, Radia was one of only fifty women in a class of nearly a thousand at MIT. In coed housing, she was the resident female, an oddity. She never saw any other women in her math classes. When she did glimpse one in a campus crowd, she’d just think, “Gee, that person looks out of place” before remembering how she might look out of place, too, if only she could see herself. At Radia’s first programming job, the male programmers she worked with would “do things intended to be friendly and to impress me,” like sitting around her as she worked, pointing out everything she was doing wrong. The dynamic made her self-conscious to the point of diverting her professional path: as an undergraduate, she designed a system for teaching programming to children using tactile controllers and buttons, inadvertently creating the field of tangible computing, but she gave it up because she worried that having “cute little kids” around would mean she’d never be taken seriously as a scientist.
Jake Feinler met Radia the first time she visited MIT, the ARPANET host site where the kids ran the computers. Although Radia was just an undergraduate, she stuck out in Jake’s memory for staging a feminist action at the AI lab, where she worked alongside those nosy male programmers. “She was busy freeing the johns,” Jake remembered. “The women had to go down a couple of floors to go to the john and the men’s john was on the same floor as the computers. I thought that was an interesting concept, liberating the johns.” Radia tells me it was nothing so revolutionary, she just put signs up, “saying something about, ‘this bathroom does not discriminate based on gender, height, or any other irrelevant properties.’” She was the only woman in the lab, but they still made her take the signs down. Many years later, when she was a distinguished fellow at Intel, she’d truthfully tell visitors that she had her own private restroom. They’d be impressed, until one saw her walk into the women’s restroom. “The more senior you get, the fewer women there are,” she says.
Radia’s mother had been a computer programmer in the age of punch card machines, and wrote one of the earliest assemblers while working for the government. When Radia was a kid, it was her mother who helped her with math and science homework, but Radia didn’t inherit her love of hardware. “I wanted nothing to do with computers,” Radia says. She preferred logic puzzles and music, and although she excelled in school, she secretly fantasized that a boy would beat her in math and science someday. “My plan was to fall in love with him and marry him,” she says. That never happened. Instead, she was first in her class.
Radia’s very first contact with computers, in high school, was through an extracurricular programming class a dedicated teacher had arranged for her. She discovered that all her fellow classmates had been taking radios apart since they were seven, and they knew fancy computer words like “input.” She felt like she’d never catch up. “I never took anything apart,” she says. “I would have assumed I would break it, or get electrocuted.” In her introductory computer science course at MIT, the lab returned her first program with an angry note. She’d done something terribly wrong, sent the computer into a loop, and wasted reams of paper. To this day, Radia calls herself a last adopter, and although she did eventually crack programming, she gave it up in the 1970s. She has been told, again and again, the same myths we’re all told about what it takes to be a good engineer: taking elec
tronics apart from a young age and focused, borderline obsessive attention to technical details. “Certainly, people like that are very valuable,” she tells me, “but they’re not able to do the things that someone like me can do.”
Radia designs routing algorithms: the mathematical rules determining the flow of data across a network. She broke into the field when she dropped out of graduate school to take a job at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, where she fell in love with networks but was so consistently ignored by her coworkers that she once gave an entire presentation about the solution to a difficult, unsolved routing problem, only for the man running the meeting to announce that there was a difficult, unsolved routing problem he wanted everyone to solve—the very problem to which she’d just presented the solution. She was hurt but unsurprised. Fortunately, a representative from the Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, approached her after the meeting. “He said, ‘Are you happy professionally?’ And I said, ‘I guess so.’ And he said, ‘You were just completely ignored, didn’t that bother you?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m used to it. Everyone ignores me.’”
He offered her a job on the spot.
When she worked at DEC in the ’80s, it was still so normal for programmers to chain-smoke in their cubicles that it took Radia three years to realize that she was allergic to cigarette smoke. “I always had the world’s worst cold,” she says. “Wherever I went, I had to carry a wastepaper basket and a large box of tissues and was just disgustingly blowing my nose constantly—this horrible loud sneeze you could hear all over the building. One time, I kind of walked in and I sneezed, and someone said, ‘Oh, Radia’s here.’” When she finally went to the doctor and realized she wasn’t even sick, she threatened to quit, but they sent her to graduate school instead. When she came back, DEC had fixed the smoking problem “by issuing a memo saying, quote, ‘Don’t smoke in the building,’ unquote,” Radia says, and laughs. Back on the job, she invented protocols that would have an indelible effect on the robustness and stability of all computer networks.
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