Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  “ALGORHYME”

  Radia thinks conceptually, and when she describes her approach to her work, she sounds a lot like Betty Holberton of the ENIAC Six, who liked to move around problems bit by bit, like a radar. Radia calls it “stepping outside of the complexity of a particular implementation to see things in a new way.” By removing extraneous details and focusing on one thing at a time, she says, she’s able to find the simplest solutions to complex problems. And because of her earliest experiences with programming, she values ease of use above everything else. “I try to design things that someone like myself would like to use,” she explains, “which is that it just works, and you don’t have to think about it at all.”

  In 1985, Radia was at DEC. At the time, Ethernet—a technology for networking computers locally, as within a single building—was becoming a worldwide standard, threatening to replace some of the more complex protocols that were Radia’s specialty. But Ethernet could properly support only some hundred-odd computers before the packets of information traveling around the network started to collide and interrupt one another, like a bad conference call. This meant it could never really scale. Radia’s manager at the time tasked her to “invent a magic box” that would fix Ethernet’s limitations without taking up an additional iota of memory, no matter how large the network was. He issued this decree on a Friday, right before he was to leave on a weeklong vacation. “He thought that was going to be hard,” Radia says. That very night, Radia woke up with a start and a solution. “I realized, oh wow—it’s trivial,” she says. “I know exactly how to do it, and I can prove that it works.”

  Like all the best innovations, it was simple. The packets couldn’t all travel on the same path without stepping on one another, so there had to be unique paths between every computer in the network. These paths couldn’t loop—no doubling back on the journey from point A to point B. Radia’s algorithm automatically created routes for each packet based on a spanning tree, a kind of mathematical graph that connects points to one another with no redundancies. Not only did it solve the Ethernet problem but it was also infinitely scalable and self-healing: if one computer in the network goes down, as computers are wont to do, the spanning-tree protocol automatically determines a new route for the packet. This is Radia’s signature touch. She designs systems that run with minimal intervention, through self-configuring and self-stabilizing behavior. This approach makes a large computer network like the Internet possible. As she said in 2014, “Without me, if you just blew on the Internet, it would fall over and die.”

  Radia took the rest of the weekend off after inventing the spanning-tree protocol. She wrote up the specifications on Monday and Tuesday. Her manager was still on vacation, and because this was long before people checked their e-mail every waking hour, Radia couldn’t share the accomplishment with him. Unable to concentrate on anything else, she decided to write a poem. She went to the library, looking to borrow the opening line—“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree”—from a Joyce Kilmer verse her mother had loved. “The librarian vaguely remembered the poem, too,” she says, but they could find only a brief reference to it in the encyclopedia. So Radia called her mother, the former programmer who had helped her with math and science schoolwork throughout her childhood, and asked her to recite it. Her mother had an ironclad memory. “She said, ‘Certainly,’ and she quoted it to me over the phone.” From this, Radia adapted her spanning-tree algorithm to verse:

  Algorhyme

  I think that I shall never see

  A graph more lovely than a tree.

  A tree whose crucial property

  Is loop-free connectivity.

  A tree that must be sure to span

  So packets can reach every LAN.

  First, the root must be selected.

  By ID, it is elected.

  Least-cost paths from root are traced.

  In the tree, these paths are placed.

  A mesh is made by folks like me,

  Then bridges find a spanning tree.

  When her manager returned to work the following Monday, he found two things sitting on his office chair: the spanning-tree protocol specifications and the poem, which has taken on mythical dimensions in network engineering circles. Many years later, Radia’s son set Algorhyme to music, and Radia and her daughter, an opera singer and violinist, performed it at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. As for the spanning-tree protocol, it transformed Ethernet from a limited, localized technology into something that could support much larger networks, and it is now fundamental to the way computers are networked. It’s Radia’s most famous, although by no means her only, contribution to networking. Her work might be invisible to the everyday user, but it’s invisible in the way that laws are invisible or the rules of traffic in a busy city are invisible: it directs the flow of information at a layer beyond our conscious awareness. “If I do my job right,” she explains, “you never see it.”

  Chapter Nine

  COMMUNITIES

  I like looking out the window when I fly. It’s comforting to see the orderliness of the world from the sky, the way even big, chaotic cities resolve into comprehensible systems, their invisible rules made visible by a great enough vantage. Even Los Angeles, a city with no rational grid, makes sense from above: as an accumulation of town centers that grow radially, outward, until their edges touch, blending into the contiguous urban environment outsiders scorn as sprawl. As the architecture critic Reyner Banham noted, the Angeleno method of core sample—car and long boulevard—reveals a staggering, nearly geological accretion of communities, all overlaid and entangled. “I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original,” he wrote in 1971.

  The Internet developed much the same way, as the simultaneous expansion of many points. To read it in the original is no longer possible, although there are relics that give a taste: the RFCs where ARPANET pioneers hashed out the Internet’s rules, which are archived online along with the hundreds of other documents Jake saved from the trash heap, and the entrails of Community Memory’s corpus of messages, preserved as printouts on double-sided tractor-feed paper in a museum archive. But just as Los Angeles’s villages enmesh in their joyful simultaneity, much of what was so wonderful about the first outposts of Internet culture has been lost in color, noise, and time.

  E-mail was the ARPANET’s killer app: thanks to the introduction of instantaneous messaging, the network designed for academic research became, in short order, a communications medium, with purely social chatter eclipsing resource-sharing and military applications to become the dominant use, “rather like taking a tank for a joyride,” as one historian notes. This seems to be the case wherever and however computers are linked: we go online to find information, but mostly we go online to find one another.

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the ARPANET changed hands: from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to the Defense Communications Agency, and then eventually the National Science Foundation, growing regardless of its keeper, until it was opened to commercial interests in the early 1990s. Simultaneously, other communications hubs began to emerge across the country, and the world, spurred by the introduction of the personal computer. Like Community Memory, these were electronic bulletin boards, but they weren’t public-access terminals with a coin slot. Rather, this next generation of bulletin boards was accessed from home by early adopters with microcomputers and modems, using server software called BBS—bulletin board system.

  A modem modulates and then demodulates a carrier wave before and after sending it through a phone line. It’s a relatively old technology—AT&T set the standard in the early sixties—and even the modem connecting Leopold’s to Resource One was a glorified telephone handset. When faster modems came along, baked into chips, the earliest BBS users filtered their waves through the finer sieve of their homebuilt computers, calling into outposts within their own area codes. The cost of long-distance
calls served as a natural fence, keeping each BBS fiercely localized, at least during peak traffic hours, when phone bills added up more easily. Eager system administrators, or “sysops,” improved on the original code to develop an impressive array of varietals for early PC hardware. Like its cork-board predecessor, BBS began as a system of exchange; like Community Memory, it became a world unto its own.

  Some geographic communities, sensing value, invested in community networks, or FreeNets: local-access hot spots for civic information and neighborly dialogue. Many popped up in the American West, where connectivity was limited. These include the Big Sky Telegraph, a BBS network in rural Montana schoolhouses, the Telluride InfoZone, one of the earliest Internet-based local information systems in the world, and the Boulder Community Network, which is still active today. Madeline Gonzales Allen, a systems engineer who quit her job at AT&T to build community networks after the Colorado and Utah wilderness “touched her core,” developed two of these, moved by a vision of “communities coming together and deciding for themselves how they wanted to use the then nascent public Internet for the benefit of their own communities,” rather than leaving it to the rarefied few.

  FreeNets notwithstanding, until the popular adoption of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s, local dial-in BBS was the primary way people with personal computers got “online.” As the ARPANET traveled its long road into civilian hands, BBS filled the gap. This represents nearly twenty years of network culture; during that time, some 150,000 individual BBSs flourished in the United States. Even when a meta-network, the FidoNet, came along to connect them all into a national community of villages, the local flavor of each remained distinct.

  It would be facetious to claim that women were particularly well represented in this culture. In a five-part documentary about BBS, the most thorough document of its origins we’re likely to ever see, a dominating percentage of subjects are male. BBS was like CB radio: a tinkerer’s utopia. Some sysops made a tradition of shuttering their boards to new users in the months following Christmas, so intolerable was the annual influx of twelve-year-old boys with brand-new modems posting “Van Halen rules!”

  Aliza Sherman, a developer who built some of the earliest Web sites for women (Cybergrrl.com, Webgrrls.com, and Femina.com) has a great story about coming online during this time. It was 1987 and she had just bought her first modem. She was poking around a New York City–area BBS when a sentence appeared on her screen: Do you want to chat? She leaped from her seat, imagining that the computer was talking directly to her. Once she’d calmed down, she realized that the message had come from a real person, a fourteen-year-old kid in Brooklyn. This was just as mind-blowing, if not more: her “first realization that there were people, not just computers, on the other side of this phone line.” Those people were teenage boys.

  YOWOW

  There were places online for grown-ups. Out in Sausalito, the same Bay Area techno-idealism that had galvanized Community Memory and Resource One a decade previous gave birth to The WELL, a BBS for West Coast intellectuals. It was a joint venture between Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist with a computer-conferencing company, and Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Review. Brand was known as a connector—the counterculture had been browsing the Whole Earth Catalog for solar ovens, composting toilets, and radical books for nearly a generation—and a scribe of disruptive technologies. “All software does is manage symbols,” he wrote in 1984.

  BBS had a reputation as a realm of nerdy fiefdoms, but The WELL was different. Fans of the Whole Earth publications signed up to chat with the writers, editors, and subjects of their favorite magazine, expecting a level of discourse that Brand and his cohort were happy to indulge. The WELL offered membership by subscription, and the community came with tech support, a full staff ready to answer questions and troubleshoot its prohibitively complex, text-only interface, a platform called PicoSpan that takes some tenacity to learn.

  The WELL was unique in the world of BBS, and its staff was, too. Stewart Brand “wanted to have an experiment,” Nancy Rhine, an early WELL employee, tells me. “He wanted to see what would happen when people with community-building skills in real life transitioned into exploring it in virtual worlds.” Nancy was one of those people: she came to the Bay Area from The Farm, a commune in rural Tennessee founded by a group of hippies who pitched a tent at the conclusion of a cross-country school bus caravan in 1971. Most of The WELL’s founding staff was hired from The Farm: folks picking up their things and heading West after a decade plus of organic farming, group marriage, home birth, and LSD.

  Naomi Pearce, a tech publicist who discovered the community in the late 1980s, says that when she first joined, “it was like somebody had literally opened a door, like I’d been in my little apartment for a while, and somebody had opened the door, and there was the rest of the world.” Naomi is a Deadhead, as were many of The WELL’s users in those days—Grateful Dead fans were early adopters, having traded bootleg tapes in underground networks long before the Internet. This flavor seasoned the culture. To this day, WELL users call themselves “WELLbeings” and send “beams” for moral support. The WELL had the leggy freshness of a booming frontier or a nation determining its constitution in the afterglow of a revolution. The closest thing it had to law was an axiom handed down by Stewart Brand: You Own Your Own Words. Or, as the WELLbeings say, YOYOW.

  When the National Science Foundation, which inherited the ARPANET from the military and rebuilt it with a faster backbone, first experimented with lifting its commercial restrictions on the Internet in the early 1990s, The WELL became one of the first commercial Internet service providers. Nancy Rhine did a little bit of everything for the growing business: she kept the books, cowrote the manual, answered phones, and handled support for international users. She’d signed up for an electronic commune, but she noticed one big difference between The WELL and her life back on The Farm, which is still famous for its school of natural midwifery. The WELL community may have been dialing in from all over the world, but it was mostly male. “The WELL stood for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, but it did not represent the whole Earth,” Nancy says. “The bell curve of distribution would have probably been thirty-year-old white guys.”

  ECHO

  Not everybody is a thirty-year-old white guy, and not everybody loves the Grateful Dead.

  Stacy Horn, a graduate student in New York City, least of all. When she dialed The WELL for the first time in the early 1980s, she kept a wide berth from the Deadheads. There were enough conversations to interest her: with all its journalists, ex-hippies, and hobbyist computer programmers, dialing The WELL was like visiting California for the cost of a long-distance phone call. Only a keystroke away from her Manhattan apartment, this populace of bright-eyed strangers had a distinctly West Coast feel. But once she got over the thrill—and balked at her first month’s phone bill—Stacy began to feel out of place. Like any New Yorker vacationing in California, the sunshine did her good, but her heart was elsewhere.

  Stacy was enrolled in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a graduate program in creative technology that’s part laboratory, part think tank, so whiling away a few afternoons on a BBS passed for homework. Although she was studying computers, she didn’t want to talk about them when she went online. Stacy wanted to talk about literature, film, culture, and sex. She wanted a place to flirt, gossip, and argue. She wanted some women around, and friends she stood a reasonable chance of meeting in real life. Above all, she wanted something that felt like New York City—more techno-hipster than techno-hippie. “I can’t send beams to someone,” she complained in her 1998 book, Cyberville. “It’s not my style. I can communicate with self-loathing, however.”

  In 1988, a friend on The WELL asked Stacy when she was going to start her own BBS for the East Coast. The thought hadn’t occurred to her, but the relative safety of graduate school was spooling away, and she had no future plans. In the time it took for her to
type a response, she’d decided: she would start The WELL for New Yorkers. She made up a name on the spot. She’d call it the East Coast Hang-Out. Echo. Stacy wasn’t—her word—a “techie.” Nor was she a businessperson. But she was good with people, and the tech stuff could be learned. Her time on The WELL had taught her the basics: online communities emerge spontaneously whenever two or more individuals discover they like the same thing. People go online for information; they stay for the company. Nobody posts in a void. We share, for better or worse, together. Stacy figured that if she could get New Yorkers on a BBS and get them talking, they’d stay. They might even pay for the privilege.

  She dropped an elective course and wrote a business plan. “It wasn’t like I was a visionary,” she says. Computer conferencing was obviously going to be huge, because everyone who tried it got hooked. “All you had to do was sit down and do it, and it was instantly fun. It was just fun, right away. You just could see it.” But Stacy’s certainty was far from universal. In 1988, beyond the Bay Area’s techno-hippies and the teenage tyrants on BBS, not many people had sat down and done it. Web sites wouldn’t exist for another three years, and there wouldn’t be a decent browser for viewing them until 1993. Connections to the Internet backbone were still largely isolated to government agencies, private enterprises doing business with the government, and universities.