From Sputnik to the ARPAnet
1957 - 1969
The preliminary connections of the ARPAnet, the first multiple-site computer network, are created successfully in December. The ARPAnet, intended to link research centers across the country, provides the foundation for advanced networking and breaks a path toward the Internet.
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By 1968 Larry Roberts, the ARPAnet's original architect, had devised an outline of the network. It would rely on machines he had dubbed IMPs (Interface Message Processors), which would connect the individual sites, route messages, scan for errors, and confirm the arrival of messages at their destinations. In July 1968 Roberts sent a request for proposals to build the IMPs to more than one hundred computer companies. In December, surprising many contenders, he announced the decision to award the IMP contract to Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a small firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For the next year BBN researchers, directed by Frank Heart, commit themselves to designing the IMPs. Enlisting the talents of the most promising computer scientists inside and outside the company, BBN works around the clock to deliver the first IMP by the Labor Day 1969 deadline.
BBN and ARPA request the assistance of computer scientists at the four initial sites to be connected: the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Utah, and Stanford Research Institute. The request elicits an overwhelming response, and numerous researchers -- mostly graduate students filled with curiosity and enthusiasm -- undertake to prepare their host computers for connection to the IMPs. The participation of so many graduate students shapes the anarchic culture of the ARPAnet and of networking communities in general.
Many are ultimately involved in ARPAnet design and completion, including Will Crowther, Dave Walden, Severo Ornstein, Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, Ben Barker, and Truett Thach. Finding themselves on the cutting edge of computer technology, they develop new protocols, write software, connect wires, and unknowingly start the network revolution.
Two days before Labor Day, the first IMP, all nine hundred pounds encased in gray steel, arrives in Los Angeles. Right on schedule, the second reaches Stanford on October 1, and the third and fourth are installed by early December. Linked by dedicated telephone lines, the IMPS allow users to log on to remote computers and run their programs. The ARPAnet's four-node preliminary trial is a success.
A quickly formulated system for logging on to remote sites, Telnet, is implemented at the last minute. It is replaced by a glitch-free program, Network Control Protocol (NCP), in 1971. By spring of that year, nineteen other sites across the country have joined the ARPAnet. The following year, the network makes its public debut at the International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington D.C., and the idea for a much more expansive network sprouts roots all over the country.
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Like the teenagers who left suburbia by the thousands, seeking out new paths as hippies, activists, and anarchists, computer networking in the 1960s went through an adolescent rebellion of its own. Originally a spawn of the establishment, ARPAnet was turned over to universities, where it was forever transformed by the counterculture. By 1969 ARPAnet host computers (called IMPs) had been set up at universities across the country. Professors barely had enough time to prepare for the arrival of their computers, never mind try to connect them to computers at other schools. Since the "grown-ups" were busy, the job of figuring out how to get computers across the country to speak to one another was left to graduate students. That summer sixty-eight graduate students calling themselves the Network Working Group met to discuss networking protocols. Their first discussions were documented and titled "Requests for Comments" (RFCs). By deciding to call the documents "Requests for Comments" rather than "guidelines" or "memoranda," the students broke down the command and control that typified most computing circles of the time. In the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, authors Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon observe that the group's open, nonhierarchical style allowed people to feel that the ARPAnet was going to be "a kind of open club, that all were invited to join." Net historian Steven Levy notes that the "hacker ethic" includes tenets such as "information wants to be free," "mistrust authority," and "hackers should not be judged based on degrees, age, race or position" -- ideas that have roots in the sixties counterculture, particularly in the Free Speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley. On the Internet, the hacker ethic began with the Network Working Group, and the Net remains a place where protocols are discussed and debated in open forums among equals, rather than handed down from "on high." The Internet's hippie inheritance is more than just philosophical, as evidenced by The Whole Earth Catalog, published in San Francisco in 1968. Once described as "the Sears catalog for the New Age," The Whole Earth Catalog featured products and advice for the counterculture lifestyle. In 1985 the makers of the catalog started their own Internet community, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL). Later on the catalog would spawn the magazine Mondo 2000, which in turn begat Wired. As this genealogy suggests, although most computer projects in the 1960s were sponsored by the military, the pioneers of the Internet were strongly influenced by the youth movement of the time. Today some people argue that the Net has become so commodified that it has outgrown its military-turned-hippie beginnings. Nevertheless, no matter what the future holds, there will always remain certain elements of the Internet -- online community-building, social activism, preteen computer wizards -- that are reminders of 1968, the year young people changed America. |