An insightful look at the "facts" -- worth reading djf more on 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well the start of the Arpanet anyway djf)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bob Taylor <R.W.Taylor () comcast net>
Date: October 6, 2004 2:45:03 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: [IP] more on 35th Anniversary of the Internet (well the start 
of the Arpanet anyway djf)

 Hello Dave.  I agree with you that Rick Adams was "right to the 
point".  Here is some more ARPAnet history background.

 In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project.  I was Director 
of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late '65 
to late '69.  There were only two people involved in the decision to 
launch the ARPAnet:  my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, 
and me.

 From 1962 to 1970, beginning with J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, 
and then me, IPTO funded several of the first projects devoted to the 
creation of interactive computing -- then referred to as time-sharing.  
In '64 - '65, I witnessed that within each local site when users were 
first connected by a time-sharing system, a community of people with 
common interests began to discover one another and interact through the 
medium of the computer.  I was struck by the fact that this was a 
wonderfully new and powerful phenomenon. 

 The next obvious step was to connect those sites with an interactive 
network.  To me, computing was about communication, not arithmetic.  
Hence the ARPAnet.
 This theme is elaborated in a paper Lick and I wrote in 1968 entitled, 
"The Computer as a Communications Device".  Google can find it for 
you.  On the last couple of pages there is a scenario that is 
reminiscent of today's Internet.

 Numerous untruths have been disseminated about events surrounding the 
origins of the ARPAnet.  Here are some facts:
           The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by 
considerations of war.  The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with 
common interests to connect to one another through interactive 
computing even when widely separated by geography.

          The singularly most important contribution to the 
architectural design of the ARPAnet/Internet came from Wesley Clark:  
the interface message processor (IMP).  Wes is the designer of the LINC 
which was arguably the first personal computer.  Wes' ARPAnet concept 
ensured the critically valuable distributed architecture of the 
ARPAnet.  Prior to Wes' contribution, Larry Roberts, whom I hired in 
Dec '66 to be ARPAnet's program manager, was considering a single, 
central ARPAnet control computer at a military base in Nebraska.  
Fortunately, Wes quickly disabused Roberts of this notion.


    The most significant role in actually building the ARPAnet was 
played by Frank Heart and his Bolt, Beranek & Newman team:  Severo 
Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Barker, Bernie Cosell, Dave Walden, and 
Bob Kahn. 

     Two suspicious claims relating to the ARPAnet were an important 
part of the case for awarding the 2001 Draper Prize to Kahn and 
Kleinrock. 
      1. Kahn has claimed far and wide to be "responsible for the 
systems          
          design of the ARPAnet" while a member of the BB&N team.  Since
          no other team member agrees, I doubt the validity of this 
claim. 
     2.  Roberts and Kleinrock (close friends since college) began to 
claim
          in 1995, more than 30 years after the fact, that Kleinrock 
invented  
          packet switching.  Most of us believe that Donald Davies in 
England
          and Paul Baran in the U.S. independently invented packet 
switching in
          the early '60s.
 I believe these two claims are false but they are recorded as facts on 
the web sites of the National Academy of Engineering and the Computer 
History Museum.  The worst property of self-promotion is that it takes 
credit away from the people who actually made the contributions.  
Roberts, Kahn, and Kleinrock have, however, made other important 
contributions.  These can only be tarnished by extravagant claims.

    Packet switching is an important part of modern networking, but it 
is not the only key piece.  The multiplicity of the applications and 
the openness of the standards also played critical roles in ARPAnet 
development, as did Steve Crocker's initiation and management of the 
RFC process.


          I believe the first internet was created at Xerox PARC, circa 
'75, when we connected, via PUP, the Ethernet with the ARPAnet.  PUP 
(PARC Universal Protocol) was instrumental later in defining TCP (ask 
Metcalfe or Shoch, they were there). 

           For the internet to grow, it also needed a networked 
personal computer, a graphical user interface with WYSIWYG properties, 
modern word processing, and desktop publishing.  These, along with the 
Ethernet, all came out of my lab at Xerox PARC in the '70s, and were 
commercialized over the next 20 years by Adobe, Apple, Cisco, 
Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that were necessary to the 
development of the Internet.


        The ARPAnet was not an internet.  An internet is a connection 
between two or more computer networks.  The ARPAnet, with help from 
thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet.  Without the 
ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a much longer time in coming.


 rwt

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