Book review: by Jim Scheef This is the companion book to a PBS mini-series first broadcast in 1996. The book is readable – even exciting – in the early chapters about the events that lead to the ARPAnet project. The people who conceived and funded the project are a fascinating bunch of nerds from the time before the word was coined. While the birth of the Internet is now history, much of this book is “near term history”. The dot-com bubble was a fascinating time for business, technology and our country as a whole, but 1998 was too soon to try to write about these events as “history.” The writing fades as the events get into the 90’s and thus too close to then-current events. The story of technology in the 90’s needs to be rewritten in about another ten years when authors can re-research the people, companies and events of the dot-com bubble. In the meantime, enjoy this book as it does an excellent job on the pre-history and early days of the Internet. The first two chapters start the story with many people in many places and then links them all together. While the United States had a comfortable lead in computer technology by the mid-50’s, the launching of Sputnik in 1958 gave a sense of urgency to just about anything technical or scientific. To keep track of all this and to limit the growing power of the military-industrial complex, President Eisenhower created the Advanced Projects Research Agency, or ARPA. Later a ‘D’ was added for Defense. From the beginning this agency was given a large budget and almost no constraints. When NASA was created, its budget was carved out of ARPA, leaving the agency with a much smaller but still substantial budget and almost no public scrutiny, a recipe for success that would be impossible to replicate today. There is a difference between secrecy and just doing a job with a lack of fanfare. Programs hidden in the CIA and NSA have been disasters for our civil liberties. Ike made ARPA a civilian agency for a reason. The ARPA mission was to fund projects in universities and advanced research centers. As part of these projects, each university would request funds for a computer, which in those days meant something that filled a large room and cost many millions of dollars. Each university would request a computer larger and more powerful than the previous school and an ever-larger portion of ARPA funds went for these computers. Eventually Bob Taylor, then head of ARPA realized that this could not continue and looked for a way to share computing resources amongst various projects. This was the genesis of the project that would become the Internet. In the 60’s, American sociologist and information technology pioneer Ted Nelson first described what we know today as the Internet. He called it “Xanadu” and his dream network included hypertext and hypermedia, both his inventions. He is best known for his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machine, in which he describes Xanadu and much more. In 1968 connecting computers was not only difficult, it was essentially impossible if the computers were from different manufacturers. By this time many people had published academic or technical papers on the problem. Several people in wildly different times and circumstances all came up with what is now called “packet switching”. The basic idea is to break up data into small packets, add sender and destination addresses and push them out on a network that allows for multiple paths. When the packets arrive at the destination, they are acknowledged and reassembled in sequence. In mid-1968, ARPA issued a request for quotation (RFQ) for a network to connect three (expanded to five) ARPA-funded computing sites. Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a small engineering company outside Boston was the winner. Many of the people at BBN, ARPA and the first network sites were all tied together by links to MIT and Lincoln Laboratory, MIT’s research site. Many are also tied together by a common interest in the mathematics of beating the casinos at blackjack. Their exploits in Las Vegas are hilarious and add to the fun reading. Beating the casinos is a recurring theme in the world of hackers and computer nerds. As you might guess, “establishment” companies like AT&T and IBM said it would not work. In their bid proposal BBN said it would be “difficult” even though they had already made many of the pieces work in independent tests. The ARPAnet was born October 29, 1969, when the first connection was tested between UCLA and Stanford. There is a trick question: What were the first five letter typed and sent over the ARPAnet? The correct answer is “L O G L O”. Read the book to understand why the answer is not “L O G I N”. Almost simultaneously to the BBN project, another ARPA-funded project proceeded at the University of Hawaii. The Alohanet (upper case in the middle of words was not yet invented) used radio links to network computers on several Hawaiian Islands. Implemented in 1970, this network proved that the packet concept would work over long distances – even without wires! Several key concepts of Alohanet led directly to the development of Ethernet at Xerox. Imagine that you have just received an advanced degree in engineering and have accepted a new job. As good as that would be, suppose you ask your new boss to pay your expenses for a two month-long trip to Hawaii BEFORE you start work at your new job! That was exactly what Bob Metcalf pulled off when he accepted a job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). During his two months in Hawaii, his study of the Aloha and ARPA networks led to his invention of Ethernet with David Boggs. To put this into time perspective, Metcalf left Xerox in 1979 to found 3COM where Ethernet was first successfully commercialized. The ARPAnet and Alohanet both used packet switching but worked differently. As the ARPAnet grew in the early 70’s it became apparent that the basic protocol had limitations. To get past these issues, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed what has become the suit of protocols that run the Internet today. Cerf had developed the original ARPAnet program called NCP or network control program and is often called the Father of the Internet. [Read the book and decide for yourself if this appellation is fair to the many other networking pioneers. Personally I think the title should go to Bob Taylor or J.C.L. Licklider or all three.] After several revisions, the current version four was implemented in the “big bang” when all machines connected to the ARPAnet and many interconnected networks all switched to IPv4 on January 1, 1983. The personal computer became a commercial product in 1975 when M.I.T.S. introduced the Altair. While it would be a few years before personal computers would be networked, the Altair, followed by the Apple II and others created the broader market that networking needed to bring costs out of the stratosphere. This book makes no attempt at a complete history of M.I.T.S. or Microsoft, the company founded to provide it software, or Apple the company that provided the platform for the first killer business application – VisiCalc. (Note that capitalizing middle letters in product names was perfected somewhere in the late 70’s.) The book continues thru the 1980’s with two important startups, SUN Microcomputers and Cisco Systems. This is also where a new character enters the story, the venture capitalist. As the book moves thru the 80’s and into the 90’s the stories bog down. I believe this is because the stories or the wounds were too fresh when the writers did their research for the television programs. Many key people in these companies either are still there or had just been ousted by the venture capitalists. The story of Sandy Learner and Len Bosack, founders of Cisco is especially maddening. Read the book. Four reasons this book is so readable is that it includes not just an index, but also a Cast of Characters, a Timeline, and glossaries of both technical terms and acronyms. Refer to these as you read and you cannot get lost. I have greatly oversimplified the stories mentioned above and have omitted several others, but you get the idea. The book is a wealth of fun facts. Read it! Enjoy! Sidebar: My copy of the book came from Abebooks.com. A quick search just now found several copies available for $3.63 delivered to your mailbox. You can’t beat that with a stick!
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