The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  Baran later explained his thinking as being aimed squarely at concerns over the hair-trigger alert that both the United States and the Soviet Union maintained with nuclear weapons. Having the ability to survive a nuclear attack would, in theory, make deterrence more stable by taking away the temptation for the other side to launch a first strike. “The early missile control systems were not physically robust,” he said. “Thus, there was a dangerous temptation for either party to misunderstand the actions of the other and fire first. If the strategic weapons command and control systems could be more survivable, then the country’s retaliatory capability could better allow it to withstand an attack and still function; a more stable position.”

  For the idea to work, the network would have to be digital, rather than analog, which would degrade the signal as it traveled. It was an ambitious, new idea, and the problem was that Rand, which Baran joked stood for “research and no development,” could not create such a system on its own.

  Rand could not build the network, but the air force could, and its leaders were interested in Baran’s idea. Before work started on it, however, a bureaucratic reorganization pushed the project over to the Defense Communications Agency—a stodgy Pentagon bureaucracy that Baran suspected was stuck in the analog world. Better to end the project, he figured, than to see it botched. “I pulled the plug on the whole baby. There was no point. I said, ‘Just wait until some competent agency comes around.’ ” That competent agency would end up being ARPA.

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  Licklider arrived at ARPA the same month that the superpowers almost went to war over the missiles in Cuba. For senior Pentagon officials, it seemed obvious that ARPA’s work on command and control was about nuclear weapons. William Godel, then the deputy director of the agency, recalled that ARPA’s new assignment was supposed to look at alternatives to Looking Glass, the code name for the military’s “nuclear Armageddon” aircraft that flew around-the-clock on alert. At the Pentagon, Harold Brown, the director of defense research and engineering, thought that he had assigned ARPA to work on problems dealing with the command and control of nuclear weapons. Brown, who wrote the assignment, recalled being influenced by one of his deputies, Robert Prim, a mathematician from Bell Labs. Prim was heavily focused on technologies for the command and control of nuclear weapons, including research that eventually led to Permissive Action Links, security devices for nuclear weapons. Brown was unhappy with the pace of developments in the military services, so he assigned command-and-control research to ARPA in the hopes it might come up with something better.

  The need to come up with something better to control nuclear weapons loomed large in the fall of 1962. Just a few weeks after he started work, Licklider attended an air-force-sponsored conference on command-and-control systems held in Hot Springs, Virginia, where the Cuban missile crisis had been front and center on people’s agenda. Yet the meeting had been lackluster, with no one really coming up with any creative ideas. On the train returning to Washington, D.C., Licklider and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, Robert Fano, struck up a conversation, and soon a host of other computer science colleagues on the train got involved. Licklider used it as another opportunity to proselytize for his vision: creating a better command-and-control system required coming up with an entirely new framework for man-machine interaction.

  Licklider was well aware of the Pentagon’s interest in command and control of nuclear weapons. One of his early program descriptions for work on computer networking referenced the need to link computers that would be part of the nascent National Military Command System used to control nuclear weapons. His vision was for something much broader, however. When he met with Jack Ruina, the head of ARPA, and Eugene Fubini, one of Harold Brown’s deputies, Licklider pitched them on interactive computing. Rather than focusing strictly on technologies to improve command and control, he wanted to transform the way people worked with computers, which meant moving away from batch processing toward time-sharing and eventually networking. “Who can direct a battle when he’s got to write a program in the middle of that battle?” Licklider asked rhetorically.

  The new ARPA research manager was determined to show that command and control could be something more important than just building a computer to control nuclear weapons. When he would meet with Pentagon officials and they would start to talk about command and control, Licklider shifted the conversation to interactive computing. “I did realize that the guys in the secretary’s office started off thinking that I was running the Command and Control Office, but every time I possibly could I got them to say interactive computing,” Licklider said. “I think eventually that was what they thought I was doing.”

  Pentagon officials did not quite understand what Licklider was talking about, but it sounded interesting, and Ruina agreed, or at least he agreed that Licklider was smart, and the specifics were not important. When the secretary of defense “asked to see me about something, he never asked me to see about computer science,” Ruina said, “he asked to see me about ballistics defense or nuclear testing detection. So those were the big issues.” Licklider’s work “was a small but interesting program on the side.”

  Ruina, an engineer, was even less interested in the behavioral sciences, Licklider’s other assignment, which was allocated just $2 million a year. Ruina dismissed the entire field as Freudian ruminations. “Tell me what has happened in the last twenty years in behavioral sciences that you would think of as a breakthrough in the sense of giving us new concepts, and thinking, and important contributions, and…did it come from any government contract—cut-pipe work, or was it a guy who is more of a novelist like Tolstoy who was able to do great human insights without having to get a government contract to do it?” Ruina asked Licklider. “He said he would think about it, and I remember he came back and could not produce anything that was very interesting, and I said, ‘Yes, that was my concern about that program.’ ” Licklider ended up spending most of the behavioral science money on human-computer interaction, rather than anything related to social science, which suited Ruina just fine.

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  When Licklider arrived at ARPA, he found an organization that contained a mix of geniuses and mediocre bureaucrats. The agency had recently started its involvement in Southeast Asia, which was still being carried out mostly in secrecy, something that concerned Licklider. “There was a kind of a cloak and dagger part of it,” he recalled in a later interview. And, more troubling, Godel, the head of all that work, “was always trying to get control over what I was doing,” Licklider said. “I could never tell what he was doing, so that part made me nervous.” Mostly Licklider was left alone, however. ARPA was still a young agency with few established precedents to fall back on. Ruina had eliminated the ARPA Program Council, one of the few bureaucratic formalities. Newcomers like Licklider were essentially making up the rules as they went along, creating what would later be regarded as the hallmark of ARPA: freewheeling program managers given broad berth to establish research programs that might be tied only tangentially to a larger Pentagon goal.

  Licklider’s immediate problem was dealing with the “white elephant,” a prototype for a new computer that was built for the SAGE air defense system. The expensive behemoth, designated the AN/FSQ-32, was a prototype for an upgraded version of SAGE, which the Pentagon had recently canceled. By 1960, the Pentagon’s primary concern was the threat of ICBMs, not manned Soviet bombers. No longer needed, the computer was essentially dumped on ARPA’s doorstep, at least administratively, along with the costs associated with the contractor responsible for it, System Development Corporation, an offshoot of Rand. The computer was a “great asset,” Licklider recalled, but it was being used for batch processing. For Licklider, an oracle of time-sharing, that was a waste, and with a cost of nearly $6 million the white elephant took up the largest portion of Licklider’s new $8 million budget for command and control. He could not kill the project, so he used the SAGE computer as an opportunity to solicit id
eas from computer scientists who shared his vision. He slowly shifted the money to “centers of excellence” in computing.

  The most ambitious of those contracts took the name Project MAC, short for Machine-Aided Cognition or Multiple-Access Computer, a wide-ranging $2 million grant to MIT. Project MAC covered the span of interactive computing, from artificial intelligence and graphics to time-sharing and networking. ARPA provided MIT with a great deal of autonomy, so long as it used the money for the goals prescribed by the agency. Licklider, who focused on vision over reputation, also took a risk on more unknown scientists, like Doug Engelbart, at the Stanford Research Institute. By the time Licklider was done handing out contracts, his centers of excellence stretched from the East Coast to the West Coast and included MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, the Stanford Research Institute, Carnegie Tech, Rand, and System Development Corporation.

  In April 1963, just six months after joining ARPA, Licklider dashed off a memo to the people he was funding, in what would become one of the more famous missives of his time at the agency. He addressed it to the “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network,” a tongue-in-cheek way of telling the ARPA-funded researchers they were part of a broader community working toward a common goal. “At this extreme, the problem is essentially the one discussed by science fiction writers: ‘How do you get communications started among totally uncorrelated ‘sapient’ beings?” he wrote. The six-page memo went on to state explicitly what he had in mind. “It seems to me interesting and important nevertheless to develop a capability for integrated network operation,” he continued. “If such a network as I envisage nebulously could be brought into operations, we would have at least four large computers, perhaps six or eight small computers, and a great assortment of disk files and magnetic tapes units—not to mention the remote consoles and teletype stations—all churning away.”

  It was the clearest articulation yet of his vision for interactive computing, and vision is what mattered in 1963, because much of what Licklider was building was a foundation of research, not an actual computer network. The lack of anything concrete to show from the initial research was also potentially a liability, because few in the Pentagon at the time really understood the full potential of computers. When Ruina left in 1963, his replacement, Robert Sproull, a scientist from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, almost canceled Licklider’s entire program. After the heyday of ARPA’s first year, when it managed space programs and had half-a-billion-dollar budget, funding for the agency had been cut almost in half by the mid-1960s, to $274 million. Sproull was under orders to trim $15 million from ARPA’s budget, and he immediately looked for programs that had not appeared to produce much in the past two years. Licklider’s computer work ended up at the top of his list, and the new ARPA director was on the verge of shutting it down.

  Licklider dealt with the threat of cancellation with his typical calm. “Okay, look, before you cancel this program, why don’t you come around and look at some of the labs that are doing my work,” Licklider suggested. Sproull went with Licklider to three or four of the major computer centers around the country and was duly impressed. Licklider kept his funding. Asked decades later about whether he was the man who “almost killed the Internet,” Sproull laughed and said, “Yes.”

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  By the time Licklider left ARPA in 1964, the term “command and control” for its computer science work was abandoned in favor of a new name, the Information Processing Techniques Office, cementing its focus on computing and shedding its old nuclear identity. His investments were already bearing fruit, small and large. At MIT, the ARPA-sponsored time-sharing system spawned the first e-mail program, called MAIL, written by a student named Tom Van Vleck. At Stanford Research Institute, the previously unknown Engelbart had experimented with different tools that would allow users to interact directly with computers; after trying out devices like light pens, he eventually settled on a small wooden block, which he called a “mouse.”

  Ivan Sutherland, a brilliant young computer scientist who had already forged an impressive reputation for his work in computer graphics, replaced Licklider. But at the time he was brought into ARPA, Sutherland was just a twenty-six-year-old army lieutenant, recruited because no one else qualified wanted the job. ARPA’s unusual system of having only temporary employees made the position difficult to fill. Government salaries were low, and there were no provisions at that point for temporary academic appointments. Sutherland, however, had no choice. “I was in the army, and I got some orders which said, ‘You are hereby ordered to proceed to the Pentagon and take this job,’ ” he recalled.

  Sutherland wanted to follow in Licklider’s intellectual footsteps but found himself facing resistance from computer scientists. He tried to get the University of California, Los Angeles, to create a network using three of its computers, but the researchers involved did not see how it would benefit them. University professors were scared that networking computers would allow others to tap into their coveted computer resources. Steve Crocker, then a graduate student at UCLA, recalled the battles for computer time. “There came a moment when the tension was so high that the police had to be called to tear the people apart who were about to fight with each other,” he said. When ARPA tried to carry out that first computer-networking project at UCLA, it ran into similar resistance. The head of the computer center “decided that being under the gun from ARPA to produce on some timely basis was not consistent with the way a university ought to operate” and “pulled the plug” on the ARPA contract, Crocker recalled.

  Sutherland called the thwarted computer-networking project “my major failure.” It was not actually a failure, it was just too soon. Shortly after Sutherland left, his deputy, Robert Taylor, took over. Taylor did not have Sutherland’s or Licklider’s reputation, but he did have vision and determination. In 1965, Taylor approached Charles Herzfeld, the new ARPA director, in his E Ring Pentagon office, and laid out his idea for a computer network that would link geographically dispersed sites. Herzfeld had long had a keen interest in computers. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he attended what he described as a life-changing lecture by John von Neumann, the famed mathematician and physicist, who talked about the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, the World War II computer that was built to speed up the calculation of artillery firing tables. Later, at ARPA, Herzfeld befriended Licklider, whose proselytizing at ARPA about brain-computer symbiosis had an equally profound effect on Herzfeld. “I became a disciple of Licklider early on,” he recalled.

  Taylor was not proposing Licklider’s small-scale laboratory experiments of a couple years earlier. Taylor wanted to create an actual cross-country computer network—something that had never been done before and would require significant new technology, investment, and arm-twisting of researchers.

  “How much money do you need to get off the ground?” Herzfeld asked.

  “A million dollars or so, just to get it organized,” Taylor replied.

  “You’ve got it,” Herzfeld replied.

  And that was it. The conversation to approve the money for the ARPANET, the computer network that would eventually become the Internet, took just fifteen minutes.

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  The Internet might have no single progenitor, but Licklider’s ability to carry out his vision from Washington, while Baran’s perfectly good idea died on the vine at Rand, underscored ARPA’s unique position in the 1960s. The ARPANET was a product of that extraordinary confluence of factors at the agency in the early 1960s: the focus on important but loosely defined military problems, freedom to address those problems from the broadest possible perspective, and, crucially, an extraordinary research manager whose solution, while relevant to the military problem, extended beyond the narrow interests of the Defense Department. An assignment grounded in Cold War paranoia about men’s minds had morphed into concerns about the security of nuclear weapons and had now been reimagined as interactive computing, which would bring
forth the age of personal computing. It was a strange journey.

  As for the ARPANET’s link to nuclear Armageddon, the truth is convoluted. The ARPANET was not built as a nuclear command-and-control system, but it was inspired by Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation and Soviet domination. Harold Brown’s interest in nuclear command and control, the Smithsonian Institution panel’s concerns about guerrilla warfare and propaganda, and Licklider’s interest in man and machine were all factors that contributed to computer networking. In an interview years later, Paul Baran aptly compared the creation of the Internet to building a cathedral. “Over the course of several hundred years: new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’ Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

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  As the director of the agency that started computer networking, Ruina understood the difficulties of crediting any one person, or influence, for what would eventually be ARPA’s most famous project. In later years, Ruina was interviewed frequently about his role in the development of the Internet. He often repeated some variation of the same theme: he really had little idea what Licklider was doing, other than he thought it was something good. “I did nothing for the Internet except hire the guy who did it,” Ruina said.

  Ruina’s statement reflected a larger truth about the research that would pave the way for the Internet: computer networking did not occupy much of the agency’s time or budget in the 1960s. Licklider was able to do what he did precisely because it was below the radar. The irony of what would later be touted as the agency’s greatest accomplishment was that it grew up in the shadow of what was about to become a much bigger focus of the agency’s activities: Vietnam. In 1962, as Licklider quietly began to build up the nation’s computer research—laying the groundwork for the Internet and personal computing—another part of ARPA was secretly helping to lay the groundwork for a disastrous war in Southeast Asia.