Number 200 - January 2000

The Internet - 30 Years and Growing
by George Johnson, The New York Times, reprinted in South County Journal Oct 31, 1999 - submitted by Harold Broomell A look back at the people and computers that worked together to form the Internet
Thirty years ago, on Oct. 29, the inaugural message was sent over the first thin reed of what was to become the Internet. It was nothing so portentous as "What hath God wrought," the words christening the telegraph in 1844. It was just the simple word "login."     There were only two nodes on what was then known as the Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet built by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. As the story has become enshrined in the folklore, a UCLA student named Charley Kline tapped out the letters "l" and "o", which were dutifully echoed back by a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, a center about 300 miles northwest in what was not yet Silicon Valley. When he typed the third letter, "g," the SRI computer was supposed to recognize and complete the full command.     Instead, the letters caused a memory buffer to overflow, bringing down the system. But it was an exceedingly minor crash said, Bill Duvall, who was tweaking the connection on the Stanford end. The buffer size was increased and the first connection was flawlessly made.     "I guess that I really don't care to be known as 'The First Guy to Crash the Internet,'" Duvall wrote in an e-mail message. What sticks in his mind is the satisfying feeling of getting the pieces of the complex system to mesh. The SRI computer had to be fooled into thinking it was talking to a regular old teletype machine, a "virtual user," which might as well have been in the same room. Stanford had practiced for the occasion by running simulations of the network connection. But there is no substitute for the real thing.     "Quite a bit of thought went into debugging the initial network connection," Duvall recalled. "When the SRI end came up, I was pretty happy. I guess that it is a bit like a symphony--it's the last note that is remembered, not all of the stuff in between."     No one apparently thought to take a picture. And no one recalls what messages followed. "It seems like it should have been 'Watson, come here! I need you!'" Duvall said, referring to Alexander Graham Bell's first, urgent telephonic command (he had just spilled battery acid). "That would not have been out of character. But, alas, I 'really don't remember."     A revolution quietly begins     And so the revolution quietly began. With one scarcely noticed milestone after another the planetary nervous system envisioned in the early '60s--cyber rhetoric is as old as a Beatles tune--unceremoniously began insinuating itself into society. A strange amalgam of Defense Department money, engineering expertise, and even a dab of countercultural idealism slowly brought on the Net we know today.     There was no big ribbon-cutting a month later when a third node was installed at the University of California at Santa Barbara, or the following month, when the reach extended outside California to the University of Utah. No golden spike was hammered into the ground to commemorate the joining of the coasts with a link to Cambridge, Mass., where a small consulting company called Bolt Beranek & Newman had won the contract to build and run the Arpanet.     What was emerging would be barely recognizable today. There were no dot coms, no World Wide Web, nothing called e-mail. The main purpose was to let university-based researchers for the Defense Department agency share computer resources, allowing someone in, say, California to run a program on a machine, in Massachusetts. Many system administrators were reluctant. Computer power was scarce. Why should they share it with strangers?     But from very early on, a handful of visionaries realized the synergistic power that would come from someday putting a computer on everybody's desk, then gradually weaving them into one great matrix. In an age when computers were still identified in the public mind with punch cards and spinning reels of tape, some of the early fomenters of the information age showed stunning prescience. The first personal computer     As long ago as 1945, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush, the engineer, educator and government research advisor came up with the basic idea of the personal computer, a device he called the memex--a mechanical extension of human memory. Never mind that it was as big as a desk and that it stored all your documents, including encyclopedias and reference libraries, on superfine grained microfilm shuffled by nimble mechanical fingers and projected onto translucent screens     Though embodied in the clunky technologies of the time the memex would work something like an associative memory--or, less grandiosely, a relational database. A user researching the history of the bow and arrow might start by calling up an encyclopedia article. When he found another relevant passage in a book, he would link the documents with a few keystrokes, encoding them with crude hyperlinks and even add his own annotations. "Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him," Bush wrote.     To his credit, Bush also speculated that going beyond "dry photography," the data might be stored as magnetized dots on metallic sheets using the technology that already existed for recording voices on spools of wire. And for entering data, he even envisioned the scanner, an outgrowth of the radio facsimile machines that already existed in his day.     The big thing Bush missed was electronic networking. As he saw the chain of events, the researcher would meet someone a few years later who wanted to incorporate the bow-and-arrow material into his own study on technology. "He sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex," he wrote, "there to be linked into the more general trail." He had invented the World Wide Web with messengers on bicycles in place of high-speed digital T-3 lines. The 'Galactic Network'     A decade and a half later,J.C.R. Licklider, one of the most visionary computer scientists of his day, took another leap with his predictions of a "Galactic Network" linking everyone to a universe of information. In a later paper titled "The Computer as a Communication Device," he and Robert Taylor, who would go on to direct the Arpanet project, imagined nothing less than "a labile network of networks, ever-changing in both content and configuration."     "What will go on inside?" they asked. "Eventually, every informational transaction of sufficient consequence to warrant the cost. Each secretary's typewriter, each data-gathering instrument, each dictation machine, will feed into the network."	There would be no need for letters, telegrams, telephone calls or even business trips. People would simply link their computers to other people's computers. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, investment advice, tax counseling, advanced scientific modeling programs--all would be available within the Net.     Online communities would form with people selected "more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." And more ominously, the two researchers speculated, those denied the benefits of this "intelligence amplification" might be relegated to an information-deprived underclass. Both bright and dark sides of today's Internet were anticipated years before the first message was sent. A slow start     For all the grandiosity of the vision, the Internet developed haltingly. To make Licklider's Galactic Net a reality, scientists and engineers had to design a communications system that operated, like none that had come before.     The obvious example to emulate might have been the telephone network, in which long-distance calls from one small town to another routed like airline flights through one or more central hubs.     But in the early 1960s, researchers began to realize that a computer network would be made much less vulnerable to failure if it was more widely spread out--less like the air travel system than like a network of back roads weaving together every municipality in the country. Each point is connected to nearest neighbors by several redundant paths. If a connecting node between A and B fails, it is easy to find an alternative route.     But there was an even more radical difference between the networks of old and the one that was about to take root. In an ordinary telephone system, two phones were linked by forming a temporary circuit, a dedicated physical channel through which the electrified voices flowed. The telegraph used a different technology called message switching: Each telegram was given an electronic address, then sent into the Net, where it would be relayed, node by node, to its destination.     Paul Baran at RAND Corp., and Donald Watts Davies at the British National Physical Laboratory, independently saw the advantages of taking this "store and forward" model a step further. A message from one computer to another would be chopped up into many little packets, which would be sent swarming through the network to find their way. Some would take this route, some would take that. Each would carry a destination label along with instructions for where the packet fit inside the overall message. No matter in what sequence the pieces arrived, they could be reassembled.     In this system, called packet switching, there would be no need to tie up a circuit for a single transmission. And since the messages were broken into smaller fragments, the flow would be smoother. Finally, if the packet got carpeted, one could just resend it and not the whole transmission.     Around the same time Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, who would preside over the establishment or the first node at UCLA, was using a mathematical tool called queuing theory to understand how data would flow in a packet switched network. By 1966, with these and other basic ideas in place, Lawrence Roberts, recruited by ARPA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mapped out the plan. E-mail catches on     Two years after the first transmission, the number of host computers grew to 23. The @ symbol was invented in 1972, and a year later 75 percent of the Arpanet traffic was e-mail. It was starting to look like the Net.     Before long, other organizations, like the National Science Foundation, wanted their own networks. By the late 1970s, Dr. Robert Kahn and Dr. Vinton Cerf of ARPA were putting the finishing touches on the lingua franca, inelegantly called TCP/IP, that would weave the patches into the electronic quilt called the Internet.     And that is just a fraction of the contributions. No one stands in relation to the Internet as Bell to the telephone or Morse to the telegraph. There was no single moment when it all came together. From the beginning, it was a continuous collaboration of many minds. And any attempt to recite the history in less than a book must be notable for its omissions.     It was not until 1984, when the Net had grown to include 1,000 host computers, that the domain name system was established that lets Amazon.com be Amazon.com and not 208.216.182.15. And in 1991 came the World Wide Web followed by Mosaic, the first graphical interface, or browser, that inspired Netscape and Explorer. The number of Internet hosts quickly exceeded a million, and this year that number multiplied fiftyfold. Barbarians at the gates     Before long the barbarians were at the gates. Scientists on the Net were suddenly getting e-mail from journalists, then from their own parents, and then from schoolchildren asking for help with their homework. The Pentagon was sharing the Web with pacifist groups, cyberspace mirroring the conflicts of the physical world.     And what a powerful tool it has become. Simply by typing "Watson, come here" into a search engine, one can now find a scanned image of Bell's original notebook pages at the Library of Congress. There on the yellowed paper, in his own handwriting, is what he really said (slightly different from what's often quoted): "Watson - come here - I want to see you."     Sitting up in the futurist's perch, where Licklider put himself almost half a century ago, today's visionaries talk about the arrival in the first decades of the coming millennium of "ubiquitous computing." Hand-held computers will merge with cell phones, talking to computers hidden in the office walls and the trunks of cars, all linked into a pervasive net. With a spoken command, a person would have instant access to the invisible ether of information.     Writing in 1960, Licklider called this kind of technobiological mind meld "man-computer symbiosis" and ventured that bringing it together might take 15 years. "The 15 may be 10 or 500," he added more realistically, "but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind."     As the Internet inevitably recedes into the background, it can almost be taken for granted - the ultimate compliment. It has become the platform on which its successor will rise. When the 40th anniversary or the 50th rolls around, it will be even harder to untangle the individual contributions to something so much bigger than its inventors.
Number 200 - January 2000