Dealers of Lightning (13 page)

This concept would develop into the ARPANET. The idea owed
something to Licklider, who had earlier proposed what he dryly called
an "intergalactic network" of mainframes. During his time at ARPA
the notion remained theoretical, however; it was hard enough to get
small-scale time-sharing systems to run individually much less in con­cert with one another. But Taylor judged that the technology had now
progressed far enough to make the concept practical. He did not
deceive himself: Building such a system meant overcoming prodigious
obstacles. On the other hand, ARPA's generous umbrella sheltered
hundreds of scientists and engineers whose prodigious talents, he rea­soned, were fully up to the challenge.

One day in February 1966 Taylor knocked at the office of ARPA's
director, the Austrian-born physicist Charles Herzfeld, armed with lit­tle more than this vague notion of a digital web connecting bands of
time-sharers around the country. At any other agency he would have
been expected to produce reams of documentation rationalizing the
program and projecting its costs out to the next millennium; not
ARPA. "I had no formal proposals for the ARPANET," he recounted
later. "I just decided that we were going to build a network that would
connect these interactive communities
into
a larger community in such
a way
that a user of one community
could
connect
to
a distant commu­
nity
as though that user were on his
own local
system."

After
listening politely for
a
short
time.
Herzfeld interrupted
Taylors
rambling presentation.
He
had
followed his
young associate
s
theoreti­cal research closely enough
to know already
the gist of his ideas.
All
he
had
was a question.

"How
much money do you
need to get it
off the ground?"

"I'd
say about a million dollars
or
so, just
to
start getting
organized."

"You've
got it," Herzfeld said.

"That," Taylor
remembered
years later of
the meeting
at
which the
Internet
was born, "was literally
a twenty-minute
conversation."

Actually getting the program
underway
required some further maneu­vering, Taylor-style.
His
candidate
for program
manager, a twenty-nine-
year-old
MIT
researcher named
Lawrence G.
Roberts, refused to
leave
his secure and intellectually rewarding
post at
Lincoln Lab despite
Tay­
lor's relentless wheedling.
After seven
or
eight
months, Taylor
was des­
perate to resolve the standoff.

"Do
we still support fifty-one
percent of
Lincoln
Lab?" he
asked
Herzfeld, who
confirmed the figure.
Taylor
asked
Herzfeld
to put in
a
call to Lincoln's director. "Tell him that it's in Lincoln Lab's and
ARPA's
best interests to tell Larry Roberts to come down and do this."
Within
two weeks, Roberts accepted a job that
would
eventually secure him a
permanent place in the computing Pantheon, as the Internet’s found­ing engineer.
As
Taylor later crowed:
"I blackmailed Larry Roberts
into
fame!"

But
by 1969 Bob Taylor was feeling
burned
out.
He
had spent more
than four years at
ARPA's
Information Processing Technologies
Office,
nearly three of those as director.
His
annual research budget of
$30
million had become the single most important force in
U.S.
computer
research.
But
the research agency was changing around him.
The
inescapable catalyst was Vietnam.

In
1967 the war had reached into the comfortable civilian enclosure
of
ARPA
and touched Taylor personally. The Johnson
White House
had appealed for help with a logistical nightmare that had nothing to
do with materiel or troop deployment. The issue was information. The
Vietnam military command, it seemed, had got itself bogged down in a
statistical quagmire. "There were discrepancies in the reporting com­ing back from Vietnam to the White House about enemy killed, sup­plies captured, bullets on hand, logistics reports of various kinds," Tay­lor recalled. "The Army had one reporting system; the Navy had
another; the Marine Corps had another."

Unsurprisingly, this system produced ludicrous results. Estimates of
enemy casualties exceeded the known population of North Vietnam,
while the reported quantities of captured sugar reached levels equiva­lent to three-quarters of the world supply. "It was ridiculous. Out of
frustration the White House turned to the Secretary of Defense to
clean this mess up. The Secretary of Defense turned to ARPA, because
ARPA was a quick-response land of agency. The director of ARPA
asked me to go out to Vietnam and see whether or not any land of
computer technology could bring at least some semblance of agree­ment, if not sanity, to this whole process."

Joined by his assistant, Barry Wessler, and three Pentagon-based rep­resentatives from the Army, Navy, and Air Force, Taylor made several
trips to the war zone. The situation was even worse than he expected.
The military was literally drowning in information. Data flowed into
depots and never flowed out. Pilots returning from missions would get
debriefed their reports entered on punch cards; then their co-pilots
would get debriefed and
their
reports recorded. But no one did anything
with the information, which piled up without anyone bothering to figure
out how or even why these reports should be collated and organized.

Taylor assigned technical teams to the trouble spots to straighten out
the chaos, although not without meeting resistance. Occasionally some
base commander would refuse to grant ARPA's civilian analysts access
to his precious cache of useless data, at which point Taylor, who trav­eled on government business as a one-star general, would be forced to
step in and pull rank.

Taylor and his group solved the military's problem, after a fashion.
They installed a master computer at the U.S. military command head­quarters at Ton Son Nhut Air Base and made it the lone repository of
all data. "After that the White House got a single report rather than
several," Taylor remarked. "Whether the data were any more correct
or not I don't know, but at least it was more consistent."

But the experience left him feeling increasingly uneasy about his
role at the Pentagon. "My first trip out to Vietnam I was thinking,
'Well, we're doing a good thing for these oppressed people. We're out
here to clean this mess up.' But by the second or third trip I realized
this is a civil war and I didn't want to have much to do with it. Nor did
I think my country should have anything to do with it."
⁰

Adding to his frustration was the war's increasing toll on ARPA. For
most of the decade the agency's civilian character had insulated it from
the deepening rifts within the military establishment. But as the war
encroached more and more, the agency had to fight for resources. By
the close of the 1960s the Pentagon had slashed ARPA's budget to half
of what it had been at mid-decade.

The agency faced mounting political troubles, too. The notion that any
arm of the Pentagon could engage in wholly innocent and purely civilian
research incited mistrust across the country. As a defensive measure,
ARPA started to shed its civilian entanglements and consciously remake
itself into what the nation thought it was anyway—an arm of the war
machine. When the Caltech engineer Eberhardt Rechtin succeeded
Herzfeld as director in 1967, he assured his congressional overseers he
would nudge ARPA toward "mission-oriented" objectives—programs
aimed at satisfying chiefly military goals. The 1969 Mansfield Amend-

"Perhaps he was
also put off by the effect American
morals
and money were having on
the bucolic country. Wessler recalled an incident
one
evening when he and Taylor
were being relentlessly importuned by two Vietnamese prostitutes at the bar of their
Saigon hotel. One pressed herself with particular vigor on Taylor, who kept turning her
away
with
the excuse that as a mere government employee he could never meet her
price.
As the
two men
were
leaving, the second prostitute stopped Wessler.
"My
friend
would like to sleep with your friend," she said. "Would you please arrange it?"
Wessler
solemnly shook his head. "I do a lot of things for Bob Taylor," he replied.
"But I
don't
do that."
ment to the military appropriations
bill
would formalize the trend, direct­ing the Pentagon henceforth to fund only projects of obvious military rel­evance.
As
if to underscore the point,
the
amendment changed
ARPAs
name to
DARPA,
the
Defense
Advanced Research
Projects Agency.