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ARPANET by Peter Grier ARP ANET ▲ Back Forward Home Reload Images Open Print Stop Go To: http://www.thomaswatson/ The roots of the Internet can be traced to the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. In the Beginning, There Was ARPANET By Peter Grier ne midsummer day in 1968, can’t see what one would want such Ocomputer scientist Severo M. Orn- a thing for.” stein was sitting in his office at the small Seldom in modern history has a tech- Cambridge, Mass., firm Bolt Beranek and nological prophecy been more wrong, Newman, Inc., when his boss walked in as Ornstein himself has since laugh- and handed him a sheaf of papers. It was ingly admitted. Despite his reservations, a request from the Defense Department’s BBN bid for and won the contract to Advanced Research Projects Agency construct ARPANET—a rudimentary, (ARPA) for companies to bid on a project four-computer experiment that has since that would link together computers at exploded into today’s world-girdling, different sites, enabling them to swap multipurpose Internet. data and files. Such a network had never Maybe the Internet would have come really been built before. Mr. Ornstein’s into existence without ARPA funding. boss wanted to know if BBN could do it. The utility of such a network is obvious, Ornstein took the papers home and and numerous scientists, including some studied them overnight. A day or two in other nations, were tinkering with later, he slapped the proposal back down similar technology at the time. on his superior’s desk. But US military funding gave com- “I suppose we could build that, puter networks a great boost and ensured if you wanted to,” he said. “But I American leadership in a scientific area 66 AIR FORCE Magazine / January 1997 ARP ANET that has become crucial to the economy as munication via a distributed net- well as national security. In fact, some of work. the researchers involved in ARPANET’s “The basic network configuration development feel that history will judge was simple,” Baran said in his Bab bage their efforts as having been as important Institute interview. “Avoid any central as the Manhattan Project. Flexible lead- node. Build a distributed network of ership from ARPA (today, the Defense nodes, each connected to its neighbor.” Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Such a spiderweb design would DARPA) helped make it a reality. enable a message to get through even if a number of strands were broken. “Great” and “Heroic” It was a relatively obvious solution In a 1990 oral history interview taped to the problem. But Baran’s second In the Beginning, by the University of Min nesota’s Charles recommendation was perhaps not so Babbage Institute, Leonard Kleinrock, obvious: Break down messages into a UCLA researcher and ARPANET components. pioneer, said, “It was one of the great “Message blocks,” he called them. experiments in science, I think. It Computers would chop up communica- There Was was a heroic kind of thing.” tions as they were sent, sending numer- However, it was the Air Force—not ous message bits speeding over various ARPA—that probably provided the first paths toward the target. Computers at the US military seed money for investigation receiving end would retrieve the bits and of computer networks and their possible reassemble them in the correct order. The ARPANET implications for national defense. approach would increase the system’s The time was the early 1960s and the efficiency as well as its reliability. place was the Rand Corp. in California. Eventually, Baran produced 11 vol- Using general research funds provided umes explaining the technical details of by the Air Force, researcher Paul Baran his proposed system. The vast majority of was investigating methods of making the information contained in the volumes strategic military communications more was unclassified. Baran did not mind if robust. the Soviets picked up the distributed- Specifically, Mr. Baran was concerned node idea. After all, if they felt more about ensuring that national command secure, the nuclear balance might be authorities could order a retaliatory more stable, and thus the United States nuclear strike in the event of widespread would be safer. war. At the time, the nuclear arsenals of Finally, in 1965, Rand formally pro- both superpowers seemed vulnerable to posed construction of Baran’s system to decapitation by a first strike. The result the Air Force. Service officials vigorously was a hair-trigger balance, with each backed the idea—though the nation’s side eyeing the other nervously for signs communications behemoth, AT&T, felt of attack. it could not be done. If leaders knew that they would The problem was that the relatively be able to hit back under almost any new Defense Communications Agency cir cumstances, Baran reasoned, was responsible for the long-distance they’d be less likely to rush into communications of all of the US military nuclear war. His solution: com- services. Baran and some higher-level AIR FORCE Magazine / January 1997 67 Defense Department officials did not computer. Based on the Honeywell 516, a certain extent, that original vision for feel DCA had the technical competence the machine was known as an Interface ARPANET has yet to be realized, note to do the job. The project was killed, at Message Processor. its pioneers. least until a more skilled implementing The first IMP went to UCLA, a center “Other things—people interactively agency could be found. of ARPA-funded research. By the end of working together, people being able the year, IMPs had been shipped to three to communicate with each other more Missed Opportunity? other ARPA hotbeds: Stanford Research easily, people being able to have joint The Air Force thus perhaps missed a Institute, the University of California, projects, and just being able to use soft- chance to make computing history, but Santa Barbara, and the University of ware they both had developed over the Baran still feels it was the right decision. Utah. ARPANET was born, though net—became much more important,” said “If the project turned into a botch, it initially it was little more than a local Frank Heart, BBN manager of the AR- would be extremely difficult to get it area network. PANET project for more than 10 years. going again,” he said. “Detractors would In 1972, an ARPANET demonstra- have proof that it couldn’t be done.” Hidden Agendas tion for the International Conference Enter ARPA. In 1966, Robert Taylor, The system was not an overnight suc- on Computer Communications became then the head of ARPA’s Information cess. To much of the US computer sci- something of a coming-out party for Processing Techniques Office, began ence world, the idea of packet switching the system. ARPA moved an IMP into actively looking for someone to run a seemed both revolutionary and dubious. a Washington, D. C., hotel and demon- computer network proj ect. In part, Mr. Furthermore, the idea of sharing com- strated everything from a remote air Taylor was looking for ways to allow puter resources was not an attractive one traffic control system to a tiny scooting ARPA-funded researchers to work more for many academics. ARPA wanted them robot directed from across the country. efficiently. Linking computers at ARPA to use a computer on somebody else’s A new computer began hooking up to centers, he felt, would help accomplish campus, via phone line; what many of ARPA every 20 days, on average. this goal. them really wanted was for ARPA to Taylor found his man in Larry Roberts, buy them spanking new computers of “Resistance” Within an intense scientist at Massachusetts their own. Throughout ARPANET’s early days, Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Labo- “For most of the people at any given the influence of the military was some- ratory, who had the requisite computer site, it was at best neutral and at worse what muted. BBN and other contractors background. Mr. Roberts had twice maybe a little antithetical to their own working on the system dealt largely with turned down the ARPA project director interests and aspirations,” BBN scientist civilian ARPA of ficials whom they con- job before he finally accepted. Many AR- Alexander Mc Kenzie told his Babbage sidered peers—not uniformed officers PANET pioneers say that, in retrospect, Institute interviewer. interested in the net’s defense applica- it was Roberts’s energetic management Each of the original ARPANET nodes tions. Some of the ARPANET pioneers and direction that made the project the was intended as a specialized software were even antiwar protestors. Ornstein, success that it was. site. The University of Utah, for instance, for one, used to joke that he was going to Working with others in the field, was then experimenting with cutting-edge take a little “Resistance” button into the Roberts by 1968 had pulled together the computer graphics. Among ARPANET’s Pentagon and pin it on a colonel’s jacket specifications for the new ARPA NET. It heaviest users in its early years were when he wasn’t looking. (Orn stein, one would mirror Baran’s idea—a distributed scientists who had changed jobs and of the Internet’s key hardware designers, net, carrying message bits for reassembly moved from one site to another. They later became a found er of the antinuclear at their destination. (Somewhere along would log on to the system largely to take group Computer Professionals for Social the way, the message-block aspect of advantage of the specialized software Responsibility.) the system came to be called “packet back at their old universities. Government bureaucracy wasn’t much switching,” perhaps to elicit the image By 1971, ARPANET consisted of 15 of a problem.
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