The Innovators

by Walter Isaacson

  65. Leonard Kleinrock personal website, http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/index.html.

  66. Leonard Kleinrock, “Memoirs of the Sixties,” in Peter Salus, The ARPANET Sourcebook (Peer-to-Peer, 2008), 96.

  67. Leonard Kleinrock interview, Computing Now, IEEE Computer Society, 1996. Kleinrock is quoted in Peter Salus, Casting the Net (Addison-Wesley, 1995), 52: “I was the first to discuss the performance gains to be had by packet switching.”

  68. Author’s interview with Taylor.

  69. Author’s interview with Kleinrock.

  70. Donald Davies, “A Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching,” Computer Journal, British Computer Society, 2001.

  71. Alex McKenzie, “Comments on Dr. Leonard Kleinrock’s Claim to Be ‘the Father of Modern Data Networking,’ ” Aug. 16, 2009, http://alexmckenzie.weebly.com/comments-on-kleinrocks-claims.html.

  72. Katie Hafner, “A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2001; Les Earnest, “Birthing the Internet,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 2001. Earnest minimizes the distinction between a “store and forward” system and a “packet switch” one.

  73. Leonard Kleinrock, “Principles and Lessons in Packet Communications,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Nov. 1978.

  74. Kleinrock oral history, Charles Babbage Institute, Apr. 3, 1990.

  75. Leonard Kleinrock, “On Resource Sharing in a Distributed Communication Environment,” IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2002. One loyalist did support Kleinrock’s claims: his longtime friend, casino mate, and colleague Larry Roberts. “If you read Len’s 1964 book, it’s clear that he’s breaking files into message units,” Roberts told me in 2014. However, like Kleinrock, Roberts had previously given primary credit for packet switching to Baran. Roberts wrote in 1978, “The first published description of what we now call packet switching was an 11-volume analysis, On Distributed Communications, prepared by Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation in August 1964.” See Lawrence Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Nov. 1978.

  76. Paul Baran oral history, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008.

  77. Paul Baran interview, by Stewart Brand, Wired, Mar. 2001.

  78. Paul Baran, “Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks,” RAND, 1964, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420/RM3420-chapter1.html.

  79. Segaller, Nerds, 70.

  80. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor. I was an editor of Time and remember the dispute.

  81. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine (Viking, 2001), 279.

  82. Stephen Lukasik, “Why the ARPANET Was Built,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Mar. 2011; Stephen Lukasik oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, Charles Babbage Institute, Oct. 17, 1991.

  83. Charles Herzfeld, “On ARPANET and Computers,” undated, http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herzfeld.htm.

  84. “A Brief History of the Internet,” Internet Society, Oct. 15, 2012, http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet.

  85. “NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking: Final Report,” 1995, http://www.merit.edu/documents/pdf/nsfnet/nsfnet_report.pdf.

  86. Author’s interview with Steve Crocker.

  87. Author’s interview with Leonard Kleinrock.

  88. Author’s interview with Robert Taylor.

  89. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf; Radia Joy Perlman, “Network Layer Protocols with Byzantine Robustness,” PhD dissertation, MIT, 1988, http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/14403.

  90. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 180.

  91. Author’s interview with Taylor.

  92. Larry Roberts interview, conducted by James Pelkey, http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/2/2.9-BoltBeranekNewman-WinningBid-68%20.html#_ftn26.

  93. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1506 and passim.

  94. Pelkey, “A History of Computer Communications,” http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/index.html, 2.9; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1528.

  95. The tale of Steve Crocker’s RFCs has been told in many variations. This account comes from my interviews with Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2192 and passim; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 1330 and passim; Stephen Crocker oral history, conducted by Judy E. O’Neill, Oct. 24, 1991, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; Stephen Crocker, “How the Internet Got Its Rules,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 2009; Cade Metz, “Meet the Man Who Invented the Instructions for the Internet,” Wired, May 18, 2012; Steve Crocker, “The Origins of RFCs,” in “The Request for Comments Guide,” RFC 1000, Aug. 1987, http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1000.txt; Steve Crocker, “The First Pebble: Publication of RFC 1,” RFC 2555, Apr. 7, 1999.

  96. Author’s interview with Steve Crocker.

  97. Crocker, “How the Internet Got Its Rules.”

  98. Stephen Crocker, “Host Software,” RFC 1, Apr. 7, 1969, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1.

  99. Crocker, “How the Internet Got Its Rules.”

  100. Vint Cerf, “The Great Conversation,” RFC 2555, Apr. 7, 1999, http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2555.txt.

  101. “The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970,” Kleinrock Center for Internet Studies, UCLA, http://internethistory.ucla.edu/the-imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970/; Segaller, Nerds, 92; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2336.

  102. Vint Cerf oral history, conducted by Daniel Morrow, Nov. 21, 2001, Computerworld Honors Program; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2070 and passim; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 127 and passim.

  103. Cerf oral history, Computerworld.

  104. Robert Kahn oral history, conducted by Michael Geselowitz, Feb. 17, 2004, IEEE History Center.

  105. Vint Cerf oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, Apr. 24, 1990, Charles Babbage Institute; Vint Cerf, “How the Internet Came to Be,” Nov. 1993, http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html.

  106. Robert Kahn oral history, conducted by David Allison, Apr. 20, 1995, Computerworld Honors Program.

  107. “The Poems,” RFC 1121, Sept. 1989.

  108. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf.

  109. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1163.

  110. David D. Clark, “A Cloudy Crystal Ball,” MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, July 1992, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/People/DDC/future_ietf_92.pdf.

  111. J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology, Apr. 1968.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE PERSONAL COMPUTER

  1. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945.

  2. Dave Ahl, who was at the meeting, said, “It fell to Ken Olsen to make a decision. I’ll never forget his fateful words, “I can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own.” John Anderson, “Dave Tells Ahl,” Creative Computing, Nov. 1984. For Olsen’s defense, see http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp, but this piece does not address Ahl’s assertion that he made the statement when discussing with his staff whether a personal version of the PDP-8 should be developed.

  3. In 1995, Stewart Brand wrote an essay for Time, which I had assigned, called “We Owe it All to the Hippies.” It stressed the role of the counterculture in the birth of the personal computer. This chapter also draws on five well-reported and insightful books about how the counterculture helped to shape the personal computer revolution: Steven Levy, Hackers (Anchor/Doubleday, 1984; locations refer to the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue, O’Reilly, 2010); Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley (Osborne, 1984); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005, locations refer to the Kindle edition); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago, 2006); Theodore Roszak, From Satori to Silicon Valley (Don’t Call It Frisco Press, 1986).

  4. Liza Loop post on my crowdsourced draft on Medium and
email to me, 2013.

  5. Lee Felsenstein post on my crowdsourced draft on Medium, 2013. See also, “More Than Just Digital Quilting,” Economist, Dec. 3, 2011; Victoria Sherrow, Huskings, Quiltings, and Barn Raisings: Work-Play Parties in Early America (Walker, 1992).

  6. Posters and programs for the acid tests, in Phil Lesh, “The Acid Test Chronicles,” http://www.postertrip.com/public/5586.cfm; Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 251 and passim.

  7. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 29, from Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 3.

  8. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 165.

  9. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (Random House, 1970), 5.

  10. Author’s interview with Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius; Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove, 1966), 22; Timothy Leary, Cyberpunks CyberFreedom (Ronin, 2008), 170.

  11. First published in limited distribution by the Communication Company, San Francisco, 1967.

  12. Brand’s story was in a March 1995 special issue of Time on “Cyberspace,” which was a sequel to a February 8, 1993, Time cover by Phil Elmer-Dewitt called “Cyberpunks” that also explored the countercultural influences surrounding the computer, online services such as The WELL, and the Internet.

  13. This section is based on author’s interviews with Stewart Brand; Stewart Brand, “ ‘Whole Earth’ Origin,” 1976, http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/WholeEarth_buton.html; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said. Turner’s book is focused on Brand.

  14. Author’s interview with Stewart Brand; Stewart Brand public comments on early draft of this chapter posted on Medium.com.

  15. Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.

  16. Stewart Brand comments on my crowdsourced draft on Medium; Stewart Brand interviews and emails with the author, 2013; poster and programs for the Trips Festival, http://www.postertrip.com/public/5577.cfm and http://www.lysergia.com/MerryPranksters/MerryPranksters_post.htm; Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Test, 259.

  17. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 67.

  18. Author’s interview with Stewart Brand; Brand, “ ‘Whole Earth’ Origin.”

  19. Brand, “ ‘Whole Earth’ Origin”; author’s interview with Stewart Brand.

  20. Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, http://www.wholeearth.com/.

  21. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.

  22. The best account of Engelbart is Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, 2000). This section also draws on Douglas Engelbart oral history (four sessions), conducted by Judy Adams and Henry Lowood, Stanford, http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/start1.html; Douglas Engelbart oral history, conducted by Jon Eklund, the Smithsonian Institution, May 4, 1994; Christina Engelbart, “A Lifetime Pursuit,” a biographical sketch written in 1986 by his daughter, http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/engelbart.html#10a; “Tribute to Doug Engelbart,” a series of reminiscences by colleagues and friends, http://tribute2doug.wordpress.com/; Douglas Engelbart interviews, in Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (Next Press, 2009) and http://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/; The Doug Engelbart Archives (includes many videos and interviews), http://dougengelbart.org/library/engelbart-archives.html; Susan Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July 1997; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 417; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 110; Bardini, Bootstrapping, 138.

  23. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986.

  24. The Life excerpt, Sept. 10, 1945, was heavily illustrated with drawings of the proposed memex. (The issue also had aerial photographs of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb.)

  25. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Smithsonian, 1994.

  26. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986.

  27. Landau and Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis.

  28. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986.

  29. The quote is from Nilo Lindgren, “Toward the Decentralized Intellectual Workshop,” Innovation, Sept. 1971, quoted in Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (MIT, 2000), 178. See also Steven Levy, Insanely Great (Viking, 1994), 36.

  30. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987.

  31. Douglas Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” prepared for the director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Oct. 1962.

  32. Douglas Engelbart to Vannevar Bush, May 24, 1962, MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium, archives, http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium.html.

  33. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 2, Jan. 14, 1987.

  34. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.

  35. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987.

  36. Landau and Clegg, “Engelbart on the Mouse and Keyset,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis; William English, Douglas Engelbart, and Melvyn Berman, “Display Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation,” IEEE Transactions on Human-Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1967.

  37. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987.

  38. Landau and Clegg, “Mother of All Demos,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis.

  39. The video of the “Mother of All Demos” can be viewed at http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html#complete. This section also draws from Landau and Clegg, “Mother of All Demos,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis.

  40. Rheingold, Tools for Thought, 190.

  41. Author’s interview with Stewart Brand; video of the Mother of All Demos.

  42. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2734. John Markoff found the reports of the Les Earnest demonstration in the Stanford microfilm archives. Markoff’s book provides a good analysis of the distinction between augmented intellect and artificial intelligence.

  43. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2838.

  44. Author’s interview with Alan Kay. Kay read sections of this book and made comments and corrections. This section also draws on Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,” ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Mar. 1993; Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning (Harper, 1999; locations refer to the Kindle edition), chapter 6.

  45. Author’s interview with Alan Kay; Landau and Clegg, “Reflections by Fellow Pioneers,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis; Alan Kay talk, thirtieth-anniversary panel on the Mother of All Demos, Internet archive, https://archive.org/details/XD1902_1EngelbartsUnfinishedRev30AnnSes2. See also Paul Spinrad, “The Prophet of Menlo Park,” http://coe.berkeley.edu/news-center/publications/forefront/archive/copy_of_forefront-fall-2008/features/the-prophet-of-menlo-park-douglas-engelbart-carries-on-his-vision. After reading an early draft of this section, Kay clarified some of what he had said in earlier talks and interviews, and I modified a few of his quotes based on his suggestions.

  46. Cathy Lazere, “Alan C. Kay: A Clear Romantic Vision,” 1994, http://www.cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall04/G22.2110-001/kaymini.pdf.

  47. Author’s interview with Alan Kay. See also Alan Kay, “The Center of Why,” Kyoto Prize lecture, Nov. 11, 2004.

  48. Author’s interview with Alan Kay; Ivan Sutherland, “Sketchpad,” PhD dissertation, MIT, 1963; Howard Rheingold, “Inventing the Future with Alan Kay,” The WELL, http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/Alan%20Kay.

  49. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 1895; author’s email exchange with Alan Kay.

  50. Alan Kay talk, thirtieth-anniversary panel on the Mother of All Demos; Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk.”

  51. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk.”

  52. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk.” (Includes all quotes in preceding paragrap
hs.)

  53. John McCarthy, “The Home Information Terminal—A 1970 View,” June 1, 2000, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/hoter2.pdf.

  54. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 4535.

  55. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2381.

  56. In addition to citations below and Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning and Kay’s “The Early History of Smalltalk” cited above, this section draws on Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (Morrow, 1988) and author’s interviews with Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, and John Seeley Brown.

  57. Charles P. Thacker, “Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Hardware,” ACM Conference on History of Personal Workstations, 1986. See also Butler W. Lampson, “Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Software,” ACM Conference on History of Personal Workstations, 1986. Both papers, with the same title, can be accessed at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/blampson/38-AltoSoftware/Abstract.html.

  58. Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Linebeck, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014); Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 2764; author’s interview with Bob Taylor.

  59. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.

  60. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 1973, 2405.

  61. Stewart Brand, “Spacewar,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.

  62. Alan Kay, “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer,” Scientific American, Sept. 1977.

  63. Alan Kay, “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” in Proceedings of the ACM Annual Conference, 1972. His typescript is at http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf.

  64. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk”; author’s interview with Alan Kay.

  65. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 3069.

  66. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk”; Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 3102.

  67. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk”; author’s interview with Alan Kay.