ONE GIANT LEAP: THE ARPANET HAS LANDED, OCTOBER 1969
In the summer of 1968, when much of the world, from Prague to Chicago, was being rocked by political unrest, Larry Roberts sent out a solicitation for bids to companies that might want to build the minicomputers that would be sent to each research center to serve as the routers, or Interface Message Processors, of the proposed ARPANET. His plan incorporated the packet-switching concept of Paul Baran and Donald Davies, the suggestion for standardized IMPs proposed by Wes Clark, the theoretical insights of J. C. R. Licklider, Les Earnest, and Leonard Kleinrock, and the contributions of many other inventors.
Of the 140 companies that received the request, only a dozen decided to submit bids. IBM, for example, didn’t. It doubted that the IMPs could be built at a reasonable price. Roberts convened a committee meeting in Monterey, California, to assess the bids that had been submitted, and Al Blue, the compliance officer, took pictures of each with measuring sticks showing how thick they were.
Raytheon, the large Boston-area defense contractor that had been cofounded by Vannevar Bush, emerged as the frontrunner, and even entered into price negotiations with Roberts. But Bob Taylor stepped in and expressed the view, already being pushed by Wes Clark, that the contract should go to BBN, which was not burdened with a multilayer corporate bureaucracy. “I said that the corporate culture between Raytheon and the research universities would be bad, like oil and water,” Taylor recalled.91 As Clark put it, “Bob overruled the committee.” Roberts went along. “Raytheon had a good proposal that competed equally with BBN, and the only distinguishing thing in the long run for my final decision was that BBN had a tighter team organized in a way that I thought would be more effective,” he recalled.92
In contrast to the bureaucracy-laden Raytheon, BBN had a nimble band of brilliant engineers, led by two refugees from MIT, Frank Heart and Robert Kahn.93 They helped to improve Roberts’s proposal by specifying that when a packet was passed from one IMP to the next, the sending IMP would keep it stored until it got an acknowledgment from the receiving IMP, and it would resend the message if the acknowledgment didn’t come promptly. That became a key to the net’s reliability. At each step, the design was being improved by collective creativity.
Just before Christmas, Roberts surprised many by announcing the selection of BBN rather than Raytheon. Senator Ted Kennedy sent the usual telegram that goes to a constituent who lands a big federal project. In it, he congratulated BBN for being chosen to build the Interfaith Message Processor, which in some ways was an apt description of the ecumenical role of the Interface Message Processors.94
* * *
Roberts selected four research centers to be the first ARPANET nodes: UCLA, where Len Kleinrock worked; Stanford Research Institute (SRI), with the visionary Douglas Engelbart; the University of Utah, with Ivan Sutherland; and the University of California at Santa Barbara. They were given the task of figuring out how their big “host” computers would connect to the standardized IMPs that would be shipped to them. Like typical senior professors, the researchers at these centers enlisted a motley crew of graduate students to do the work.
The members of this young work team gathered in Santa Barbara to figure out how to proceed, and they discovered a verity that would remain true even in the age of digital social networks: it was useful—and fun—to get together in person, interfacing in the literal sense of that word. “There was a kind of cocktail-party phenomenon where you find you have a lot of rapport with each other,” recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites.
The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent.
Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics.
So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.” His desire to be deferential kept him up at nights, literally. “I was living with my girlfriend and her baby from a previous relationship at her parents’ house. The only place to work at night without disturbing people was the bathroom, and I would stand there naked and scribble down notes.”96
Crocker realized that he needed an unassertive name for the list of suggestions and practices. “To emphasize the informal nature, I hit upon this silly little idea of calling every one of them a ‘Request for Comments’—no matter whether it really was a request.” It was the perfect phrase to encourage Internet-era collaboration—friendly, not bossy, inclusive, and collegial. “It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement,” Crocker wrote forty years later.97
The first RFC went out on April 7, 1969, mailed in old-fashioned envelopes through the postal system. (There was no such thing as email, since they hadn’t invented the network yet.) In a warm and casual tone, devoid of any officiousness, Crocker set forth the task of figuring out how the host computer at each institution should connect to the new network. “During the summer of 1968, representatives from the initial four sites met several times to discuss the host software,” he wrote. “I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected.”98 The people who received RFC 1 felt that they were being included in a fun process rather than being dictated to by a bunch of protocol czars. It was a network they were talking about, so it made sense to try to loop everyone in.
The RFC process pioneered open-source development of software, protocols, and content. “That culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has,” Crocker said later.99 Even more broadly, it became the standard for collaboration in the digital age. Thirty years after RFC 1, Vint Cerf wrote a philosophical RFC called “The Great Conversation” that began, “A long time ago, in a network far, far away . . .” After describing the informal way RFCs had begun, Cerf continued, “Hiding in the history of the RFCs is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work.”100 It was a grand statement, and it would have seemed overblown except that it was true.
* * *
One machine does not a network make. It was not until a month later, when a second IMP was delivered to SRI on the edge of the Stanford campus, that the ARPANET could truly get up and running. On October 29 the connection was ready to be made. The event was appropriately casual. It had none of the drama of the “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” that had occurred on the moon a few weeks earlier, with a half billion people watching on television. Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto. He typed in “L.” The guy at SRI told him that it had been received. Then he typed in “O.” That, too, was confirmed. When he typed in “G,” the system hit a memory snag because of an auto-complete feature and crashed. Nevertheless, the first message had been sent across the ARPANET, and if it wasn’t as eloquent as “The Eagle has landed” or “What has God wrought,” it was suitable in its understated way: “Lo.” As in “Lo and behold.” In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, “22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.”101
It was thus that in the second half of 1969—amid the static of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, Vietnam War protests, Charles Manson, the Chicago Eight trial, and Altamont—the culmination was reached for three historic enterprises, each in the making for almost a decade. NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor. And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers. Only the first of these (perhaps the least historically significant of them?) made headlines.
THE INTERNET
The ARPANET was not yet the Internet. It was just one network. Within a few years, there were other packet-switched networks that were similar but not interconnected. For example, engineers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) wanted a local-area network to connect the office workstations they were designing in the early 1970s, and a recent Harvard PhD there named Bob Metcalfe created a way to use coaxial cable (the type that plugs into cable TV boxes) to create a high-bandwidth system that he named “Ethernet.” It was modeled on a wireless network developed in Hawaii known as ALOHAnet, which sent packet data through UHF and satellite signals. In addition, there was a packet radio network in San Francisco, known as PRNET, and also a satellite version called SATNET. Despite their similarities, these packet-switched networks were not compatible or interoperable.
In early 1973 Robert Kahn set out to remedy that. There should be a way, he decided, to allow all these networks to interconnect, and he was in a position to make that happen. He had left BBN, where he had helped develop the IMPs, to become a project manager at ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office. Having worked on the ARPANET and then PRNET, he made it his mission to create a method to connect them and other packet networks, a system that he and his colleagues began calling an “internetwork.” After a while, that word got shortened a bit, to “internet.”
To be his partner in this endeavor, Kahn tapped Vint Cerf, who had been Steve Crocker’s sidekick on the group writing Requests for Comments and figuring out the protocols of the ARPANET. Cerf was raised in Los Angeles, where his father worked for a company that made engines for the Apollo space program. Like Gordon Moore, he grew up playing with a chemistry set in the days when they were delightfully dangerous. “We had things like powdered magnesium, powdered aluminum, and sulfur and glycerin and potassium permanganate,” he recalled. “When you pour them together, they burst into flame.” In fifth grade he was bored with math, so his teacher gave him a seventh-grade algebra book. “I spent the whole summer working every single problem in the book,” he said. “I liked the word problems the best because they were like little mystery stories. You had to figure out who ‘x’ was, and I was always curious to find out what’s ‘x’ going to turn out to be.” He also became deeply immersed in science fiction, especially the stories of Robert Heinlein, and began his lifelong practice of rereading J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy almost every year.102
Because he had been born prematurely, Cerf was hearing impaired, and he began using a hearing aid at age thirteen. Around that time he also started wearing a coat and tie to school and carrying a briefcase. “I didn’t want to fit in with everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to look different, be noticed. That was a very effective way to do it, and it was better than wearing a nose ring, which I figured my Dad would not have put up with in the 1950’s.”103
In high school he became best friends with Crocker, and they spent weekends together doing science projects and playing 3-D chess. After graduating from Stanford and working for IBM for two years, he became a doctoral student at UCLA, where he worked in Kleinrock’s group. There he met Bob Kahn, and they remained close after Kahn went to work at BBN and then ARPA.
When Kahn embarked on his internetwork endeavor in the spring of 1973, he visited Cerf and described all the packet-switched networks that had sprung up in addition to the ARPANET. “How are we going to hook these different kinds of packet-nets to each other?” Kahn asked. Cerf seized on the challenge, and the two of them launched into a three-month burst of collaboration that would lead to the creation of the Internet. “He and I clicked instantly on this,” Kahn later said. “Vint is the kind of guy who likes to roll up his sleeves and say let’s get on with it. I thought that was a breath of fresh air.”104
They began by organizing a meeting at Stanford in June 1973 to gather ideas. As a result of this collaborative approach, Cerf later said, the solution “turned out to be the open protocol that everybody had a finger in at one time or another.”105 But most of the work was done as a duet by Kahn and Cerf, who holed up for intense sessions at Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto or at a hotel next to Dulles Airport. “Vint liked to get up and draw these spider drawings,” Kahn recalled. “Often times we would have a conversation back and forth and he would say, ‘Let me draw a picture of that.’ ”106
One day in October 1973, Cerf made a simple sketch in a San Francisco hotel lobby that codified their approach. It showed various networks like the ARPANET and PRNET, each with lots of host computers connected to them, and a set of “gateway” computers that would pass packets between each of the networks. Finally, they spent an entire weekend together at the ARPA office near the Pentagon, where they stayed up almost two nights straight and then ended up at a nearby Marriott for a triumphal breakfast.
They rejected the idea that the networks could each keep their own different protocols, although that would have been easier to sell. They wanted a common protocol. That would allow the new internetwork to scale up explosively, since any computer or network using the new protocol could link in without requiring a translation system. The traffic between ARPANET and any other network should be seamless. So they came up with the idea of having every computer adopt the same method and template for addressing its packets. It was as if every postcard mailed in the world had to have a four-line address specifying street number and city and country using the Roman alphabet.
The result was an Internet Protocol (IP) that specified how to put the packet’s destination in its header and helped determine how it would travel through networks to get there. Layered above it was a higher-level Transmission Co
ntrol Protocol (TCP) that instructed how to put the packets back together in the right order, checked to see if any of them was missing, and requested retransmission of any information that had been lost. These became known as TCP/IP. Kahn and Cerf published them as a paper called “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection.” The Internet was born.
* * *
On the twentieth anniversary of the ARPANET in 1989, Kleinrock and Cerf and many of the other pioneers gathered at UCLA, where the network’s first node had been installed. There were poems and songs and doggerel written to celebrate the occasion. Cerf performed a parody of Shakespeare, titled “Rosencrantz and Ethernet,” that raised to a Hamlet-like question the choice between packet switching and dedicated circuits:
All the world’s a net! And all the data in it merely packets
come to store-and-forward in the queues a while and then are
heard no more. ’Tis a network waiting to be switched!
To switch or not to switch? That is the question:
Whether ’tis wiser in the net to suffer
The store and forward of stochastic networks,
Or to raise up circuits against a sea of packets,
And by dedication serve them?107
A generation later, in 2014, Cerf was working at Google in Washington, DC, still enjoying himself and marveling at the wonders they had wrought by creating the Internet. Wearing Google Glass, he noted that every year brings something new. “Social networks—I joined Facebook as an experiment—business apps, mobile, new things keep piling onto the Internet,” he said. “It has scaled up a million times over. Not many things can do that without breaking. And yet those old protocols we created are doing just fine.”108
The Innovators Page 29