Internet
creation myths
by Les Earnest <les@cs.stanford.edu>
A
work in progress; first posting
This web page responds to some recent postings on the e-list CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU . It is substantially incomplete at present but I plan to work through the list of questions at the end and will announce revisions on the same e-list and on inforoots@computerhistory.org. I invite comments and criticism as well as suggestions for additional questions to be addressed. Perhaps this will one day grow into a publishable article.
I am pleased to see that CYHIST is showing signs of life
even though it was initiated by a virus. Miles Fidelman
has passed along a
Michael S. Hart wrote: “There are people
out there trying to rewrite history to give themselves a better place in it
than they actually occupied.” Surely no
one would engage in puffery! ;-) For the record, I have made no
significant technical contributions to the Internet. However I happened to be near a lot of the
action. Here is a summary of my
involvements with internet players and technology.
1949 J.C.R. Licklider
gave me my first summer job as an undergraduate, experimenting with the intelligibility
of digitized speech.
1953 Received BS in electrical engineering from Caltech, which provided a good theoretical background (e.g. my freshman chemistry professor was Linus Pauling) but the only things I knew how to design were electrical power systems and vacuum tube circuits. Transistors had been invented in 1948 but there was little accessible knowledge about how they worked..
1953-56 Naval aviation electronics officer. the Navy insisted on restarting my electronics education with Ohm’s Law but with a difference: whereas in most of the world electrical current flows from + to – in the Navy it goes the other way. Eventually got to program a crude electromechanical digital computer (IBM CPC) to do flight simulations of aircraft and missiles and ended up reconfiguring parts of that computer. Acquired a bumper sticker saying “HELP STAMP OUT TRANSISTORS!” but it didn’t work.
1956-65 At
MIT Lincoln Lab and its spin-off, Mitre Corp., helped design the SAGE air defense system and
did systems engineering on various military and CIA intelligence systems as
well as the National Military Command System.
Concurrently developed the first successful cursive
handwriting recognizer using electronic pen input, which included the first
spelling checker. This research
was done evenings and weekends while sharing the TX-2 computer with PhD
students Ivan Sutherland, Larry Roberts, Len Kleinrock,
and others.
1965-80 As executive officer of the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL):
Represented Stanford on the ARPANET startup committee;
Supervised creation of SAIL's ARPANET connection;
Assisted Vint Cerf in
getting ARPA funding for his Stanford project that developed TCP/IP;
Wrote the FINGER program to locate people, which became a widespread Internet
utility until it was swept away by security concerns and the World Wide Web;
With Larry Tesler, created the PUB
document compiler, whose shortcomings inspired Don Knuth to create TeX, which he used to write a number of books and articles
using the SAIL computer;
With John McCarthy and Martin Frost, developed APE which provided the first
electronic news service on the net;
With John McCarthy and Mark Crispin, developed DIALNET which provided
ARPANET-like services over switched telephone lines; Bell Labs put some of that
functionality in Unix and the file transfer part was later repackaged by Frank da Cruz at Columbia University, becoming KERMIT;
Oversaw the work of Dave Poole, et al, who designed the Foonly computer, which went on to Hollywood fame as animator of the first computer generated feature film, “Tron” (1982); the architecture of DEC’s KL10 computer, which became popular on ARPANET, was based on Foonly;
Initiated Stanford's first five electronic bulletin boards,
which were later connected to Usenet,
Helped Andy Bechtolsheim a bit as he designed all of
the early Sun Workstations at SAIL.
1980-85 President
and co-founder of Imagen Corp with Luis Trabb Pardo. We
made the first desktop publishing systems using laser printers but were not
able to get funding from venture capitalists.
They were unfamiliar with laser printers but were pouring money into “Me
too” disk makers, most of which subsequently crashed. I invented a modular software security scheme
using a cryptographic scheme that eventually was patented (U.S. Patent #
4,888,798, Dec. 19, 1989). After four
years of painful but profitable bootstrapping, the VCs finally decided we were
onto something and agreed to fund the company provided that we hire a “real manager”
to run it. We lured one away from
Hewlett-Packard who then fired me, as is traditional, and then ran the company
into the ground. Imagen subsequently got
eaten by a larger fish that was in turn swallowed by Minolta. Nevertheless I made a bundle.
1985-88 Back
at Stanford as associate chair of Computer Science and also involved in
parallel processing research, I discovered that the founder of Cisco Systems,
who I was supervising, was selling Stanford technology. I prepared for legal action and induced him
to resign but later discovered that the Stanford administration avoids suing
corporations whenever possible, thinking of them as potential donors. After a couple of years, during which Cisco
illicitly made millions, Stanford gave them a sweetheart licensing deal. A few years later I ran across an endowed
chair at Stanford in the name of the chief crook and funded by Cisco. There was additional dirt beneath the surface
of these transactions but that story will have to wait till later.
ACADEMIC PROCESSION: Many SAIL faculty, staff and students carried their R&D on to other institutions. Here are some that were more-or-less Internet related.
Alan Kay, Bob Sproull, Larry Tesler and others migrated to Xerox PARC after it started up three miles away, bringing some of the SAIL culture with them. Tesler later moved on to a small startup called Apple Computers as did Jef Raskin.
Whit Diffie started his research on public key cryptography at SAIL and Ron Rivest, who had become an MIT professor, led the development of an improved public key scheme that was incorporated in RSA Inc.
Bill Weiher went to Tymshare and helped design Tymnet. He later went on to a
Here are the books I have read so far that talk about internet origins.
Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, Where wizards stay
up late; the origins of the internet, Touchstone, New York, ISBN 0-684-83267-4,
1996.
Janet Abbate, Inventing the
Internet, MIT Press,
John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future; From
Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime, Overlook Press, Woodstock, NY, ISBN
1-58567-032-4, 1999.
M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal,
Penguin Group,
These are good reads on the whole but each contains a number of factual errors
and substantial distortions, several of them shared, which suggests a common
source. I don't necessarily blame the authors inasmuch as it is hard to
tell whether the tales of self-proclaimed pioneers are straightforward, based
on false recollections or purposely distorted. I readily admit that some
of my recollections have turned out to be false but, being a pack rat, I have a
lot of records that help keep me straight.
Given that I made notes while reading the above books I
could write page-by-page refutations, but that would create a still larger book
that I expect would be rather boring.
Nevertheless I will attempt to deconstruct some of the Internet creation
myths. Please note that I do not claim
infallibility. Catch me if you can!
The FCC press release points to their new web site at http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history . From
a cursory look, it and the sites it references contain a lot of good
information with few errors, though it misses a lot of early developments. However one of the third level references,
namely http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/chunter/agora_uses/chapter_2.html
, seems to lie in a major distortion field. Rather than quibble point by
point, let me present an alternative view in Q&A format.
Incidentally, in my opinion creating a computerized version
of a function that already exists should be viewed as an adaptation rather than
an invention, even if it greatly increases functionality. Indeed, I believe that the U.S. Patent Office
has gone off the deep end in recognizing many “inventions” that are nothing of
the kind. Nevertheless, following
popular usage I will use the term “invented” instead of “adapted” for some
computerized versions of old ideas.
WHO INVENTED THE INTERNET?
No, it wasn't Al Gore. Assertions that he made such a claim (usually
delivered with a self-satisfied smirk) are false and politically
motivated. Gore reportedly did play a leadership role in rounding up
Congressional financial support for the Internet, for which he deserves credit.
The Internet came out of a confluence of several inventions, ideas, and
administrative foresights, so the question above has no straightforward
answer. Let me address some simpler questions.
WHO INSPIRED THE INTERNET?
I concur with those who point to J.C.R. "Lick" Licklider,
whose advocacy of man-machine symbiosis in the early 1960s led him to conclude
that computer networks would be essential for sharing work and resources.
He didn't know how to create such a network but he pointed the way and inspired
others to do it.
I can also affirm from personal experience that Lick was a great guy to work
for.
WHO INVENTED THE MODEM?
Jack Harrington and his group at the Air Force Cambridge
Research Center (AFCRC) in 1949.
It was a part of their Digital Radar Relay development, used to transmit
radar data over phone lines to remote locations. An improved version was patented by Jack
Harrington and Paul Rosen and became the basis of Bell Telephone’s A-1 Data
Service.
WHO INVENTED PACKETIZED DATA COMMUNICATION?
Jack Harrington’s group around 1953, after
they moved to MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
As part of the experimental
WHAT WAS THE FIRST COMPUTER NETWORK?
It was not the experimental 1967 link between the TX-2 computer at MIT Lincoln
Lab and the Q-32 computer at System Development Corp. as a number of writers
claim. The
The first operational computer network was
Each
The blue room looked like a great place to run a war. Each officer and his aide had a large geographic display showing aircraft tracks, identities, altitudes and headings, an auxiliary textual display, and a keyboard for implementing decisions, with telephones and cigar lighters also built into the consoles. (For what it’s worth, I designed the Intercept Directors’ keyboard layout and many of the supporting weapons guidance functions.)
The several books and other literature on SAGE appropriately extol its whiz-bang technology but overlook the fact that it was a “peacetime” defense that didn’t actually work and would have disintegrated under attack faster than the Maginot Line did in World War 2. For that matter, the manned bomber threat that SAGE was supposed to defend against was superseded by the ballistic missile threat even before SAGE was fully deployed. Nevertheless it was kept operating for twenty-some years, well into the 1980s, using up hundreds of thousands of vacuum tubes and billions in defense funds while provided a pleasant lifestyle for senior officers of the Air Defense Command.
Unfortunately, other military commands saw the SAGE blue
rooms and demanded their own, which turned the design and construction of
“command and control” systems into a major growth industry. The goal became to create cool looking
computer systems without regard to the functions they were to perform, leading
to dozens of beautiful but very costly systems that perform less efficiently
than those they replaced. This
military-industrial fraud against the taxpayers is still going strong. For a wry look at where military systems seem
to be going, see my millennium CACM article, “E2A is worse than Y2K”.
Still to come . . .
WHO INVENTED TIMESHARING?
WHAT ELSE HAD TO BE INVENTED BEFORE PACKET-SWITCHED NETWORKS BECAME PRACTICAL?
WHO INVENTED PACKET SWITCHING?
WAS ARPANET DESIGNED TO SURVIVE A NUCLEAR ATTACK?
WHO INVENTED DISPLAY-BASED INTERACTIVE COMPUTING?
WHO INVENTED BITMAP GRAPHICS?
WHO INVENTED THE PERSONAL COMPUTER?
WHO INVENTED EMAIL?
WHO INVENTED ELECTRONIC BULLETIN BOARDS?
WHO INVENTED INSTANT MESSAGING?
WHO INVENTED THE WORLD WIDE WEB?
WHO INVENTED BLOGGING?
WHO WILL INVENT THE NEXT BIG THING?
If there are related or alternative questions that you would like to see addressed, please send a note to les@cs.stanford.edu .