Where Wizards Stay Up Late (10 page)

Roberts also learned from Scantlebury, for the first time, of the work that had been done by Paul Baran at RAND a few years earlier. When Roberts returned to Washington, he found the RAND reports, which had actually been collecting dust in the Information Processing Techniques Office for months, and studied them. Roberts was designing this experimental network not with survivable communications as his main—or even secondary—concern. Nuclear war scenarios, and command and control issues, weren't high on Roberts's agenda. But Baran's insights into data communications intrigued him nonetheless, and in early 1968 he met with Baran. After that, Baran became something of an informal consultant to the group Roberts assembled to design the network. The Gatlinburg paper presented by Scantlebury on behalf of the British effort was clearly an influence, too. When he visited Roberts during the design of the ARPA network, Davies said, “I saw that our paper had been used so much that its pages were falling apart.”

Roberts thought the network should start out with four sites—UCLA, SRI, the University of Utah, and the University of California at Santa Barbara—and eventually grow to around nineteen. UCLA was chosen as the first site because Len Kleinrock's Network Measurement Center was there. At each of the other sites, ARPA-sponsored research that would provide valuable resources to the network was already under way. Researchers at UCSB were working on interactive graphics. Utah researchers were also doing a lot of graphics work as well as investigating night vision for the military. Dave Evans, who, with Ivan Sutherland, later started Evans and Sutherland, a pioneering graphics company, was at Utah putting together a system that would take images and manipulate them with a computer. Evans and his group were also interested in whether the network could be used for more than just textual exchanges.

Stanford Research Institute (later it severed its ties to Stanford and became just SRI) had been chosen as one of the first sites because Doug Engelbart, a scientist of extraordinary vision, worked there. Several years earlier, when Bob Taylor was at NASA he had funded Engelbart's invention of the first computer mouse (Engelbart received a patent for the device as an “X-Y position indicator for a display system”), and for years afterward Taylor pointed with pride to his support of Engelbart's mouse.

Engelbart had been in attendance at the 1967 Ann Arbor meeting of ARPA's principal investigators when Taylor and Larry Roberts announced that a dozen or so of them would be expected to tie their computers together over an experimental network and that each site would be expected to make its computer resources available on the network. While others had responded skeptically to the plan, Engelbart had been delighted with it. At the time, he was directing an SRI computer research lab. Not unlike Licklider, Engelbart was interested in using computers to augment human intellect. Under a contract from ARPA, he was developing a system (called NLS, for o
NL
ine System) that depended on computer-literate communities. He saw the ARPA experimental network as an excellent vehicle for extending NLS to a wide area of distributed collaboration. “I realized there was a ready-made computer community,” Engelbart recalled. “It was just the thing I was looking for.”

Part of the strength of NLS was its usefulness in creating digital libraries and in storing and retrieving electronic documents. Engelbart also saw NLS as a natural way to support an information clearinghouse for the ARPA network. After all, if people were going to share resources, it was important to let everyone know what was available. At the Michigan meeting, Engelbart volunteered to put together the Network Information Center, which came to be known as the NIC (pronounced “nick”). Engelbart also knew that his research group back home in Menlo Park would be equally enthusiastic about the network. His colleagues were talented programmers who would recognize an interesting project when they saw it.

The conversation with Scantlebury had clarified several points for Roberts. The Briton's comments about packet-switching in particular helped steer Roberts closer to a detailed design. In specifying the network requirements, Roberts was guided by a few basic principles. First, the IMP subnet was to function as a communications system whose essential task was to transfer bits reliably from a source location to a specified destination. Next, the average transit time through the subnet should be less than half a second. Third, the subnet must be able to operate autonomously. Computers of that era typically required several hours per week of maintenance downtime. IMPs could not afford to be dependent on a local host computer or host-site personnel; they should be able to continue operating and routing network traffic whether or not a host was running. The subnetwork also had to continue functioning when individual IMPs were down for service. This idea that maintaining reliability should be incumbent on the subnetwork, not the hosts, was a key principle. Roberts and others believed the IMPs should also attend to such tasks as route selection and acknowledgment of receipt.

By the end of July, 1968, Roberts had finished drafting the request for proposals. He sent it out to 140 companies interested in building the Interface Message Processor. The document was thick with details of what the network should look like and what the IMPs would be expected to do. It was a rich piece of technical prose, filled with an eclectic mix of ideas. Kleinrock had influenced Roberts's earliest thoughts about the theoretical possibilities. Baran had contributed to the intellectual foundation on which the technical concept was based, and Roberts's dynamic routing scheme gave an extra nod to Baran's work; Roberts had adopted Davies' term “packet” and incorporated his and Scantlebury's higher line speeds; Clark's subnet idea was a stroke of technical genius. “The process of technological development is like building a cathedral,” remarked Baran years later. “Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.'Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?' Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

But in 1968 the network's principal architect was Larry Roberts: He made the initial decisions, and he established the parameters and operational specifications. Although he would get input from others, Roberts would be the one to decide who built it.

The first responses to the request for proposals were from IBM and Control Data Corporation (CDC). IBM was then the world's largest computer manufacturer and dominated the market for large computer systems. CDC, though dwarfed by IBM, was another company that had invested heavily in developing large systems. Both declined to bid, and their reasons were identical: The network could never be built, they said flatly, because there existed no computers small enough to make it cost-effective. For the IMP, IBM had thought about proposing a 360 Model 50 computer, a large mainframe. But at a price many times that of a minicomputer, the Model 50 was too expensive to consider buying in large quantities.

Roberts, on the other hand, was thinking small. The first computer he had thought of was the PDP-8, a minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corp. Digital had released the PDP-8 in 1965. Not only was it the company's first big hit but the PDP-9 also established minicomputers as the new vanguard of the computer industry. Roberts knew Ken Olsen from Lincoln, and he thought Digital might even offer a quantity discount on the machine.

When bids started coming in, the majority had chosen a Honeywell computer instead. It was a minicomputer called the DDP-516; Honeywell had just introduced it. Part of the new machine's cachet was that it could be built to heavy-duty specifications. In its “ruggedized” version, it cost about $80,000. Shortly after the machine's introduction, at a computer conference in Las Vegas, the hardened military version was hoisted off the showroom floor by a crane. As it swung from ropes attached to the crane, a Honeywell employee took a sledgehammer to it. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the machine was tough enough to operate on a battlefield. For bidders, the more likely appeal of the 516 was its impressive cost-performance ratio and the design of its input/output system.

More than a dozen bids were submitted, resulting in a six-foot stack of paper. Marill's company, CCA, bid jointly with Digital. Raytheon bid, and so did Bunker-Ramo. Roberts was pleasantly surprised that several of the respondents believed they could construct a network that performed faster than the goal listed in the specifications.

Raytheon was a frontrunner. A major defense contractor in the Boston area specializing in electronic systems components, Raytheon had already proposed to build a high-speed, short-distance computer network. In the middle of December, Roberts entered into final negotiations with Raytheon for the IMP contract. Raytheon officials answered ARPA's remaining technical questions and accepted the price.

So it surprised everyone when, just a few days before Christmas, ARPA announced that the contract to build the Interface Message Processors that would reside at the core of its experimental network was being awarded to Bolt Beranek and Newman, a small consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Third University

When Richard Bolt and Leo Beranek started their consulting company in 1948, advanced computing was not on their minds. Beranek was an electrical engineer, Bolt an architect and physicist. Both were acousticians and members of the MIT faculty during the 1940s. Bolt had worked for the Navy in World War II on methods for using sound to detect submarines. Following the war, as head of MIT's acoustics laboratory, Bolt did consulting work, as did Beranek. MIT began receiving requests for aid in acoustical planning for new buildings around the country and passed them on to Bolt and Beranek. Independently of each other, the two had already done quite a bit of work in what is known as airborne acoustics—the sound carried in concert halls and movie theaters—as well as in noise control and noise reduction in buildings.

When the United Nations asked Bolt to design the acoustics for its new complex of buildings in an old slaughterhouse district on Manhattan's East River, Bolt called Beranek into his office and showed him the pile of papers spelling out the UN job. It was too much for one person to take on. At the time, Beranek was busy on a project to improve the acoustics in a chain of Brooklyn movie theaters. But Bolt convinced Beranek to join him in starting a consulting firm to take on the UN project. A year later they took in Robert Newman, an architect with a physics background who had been a student of Bolt's, and Bolt Beranek and Newman was born.

In its earliest days, BBN was truly a consulting company. That is, Bolt and Beranek hired people, provided them with office space—and expected them to find the work. And find work they did. The UN project was such a conspicuous success that the company didn't need to advertise for the first ten years of its existence. The business grew as BBN consulted on the design of acoustical systems for office buildings, apartment complexes, and performing arts centers. When a large wind tunnel was built for testing jet engines near Cleveland, the noise disturbed people within a ten-mile radius, and local residents threatened to have the facility shut down. BBN engineers figured out a way to muffle the sound. The company was developing expertise in analyzing audio tapes: It was called in after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and would be called on again after the shootings at Kent State University in 1970. Its most famous tape analysis would come during the Watergate scandal in 1974, when BBN would be involved in the analysis of the infamous 18.5-minute gap in the Nixon tapes. A committee headed by Dick Bolt would conclude that the erasure was deliberate.

In 1957 Beranek had recruited Licklider to BBN. He had worked with Lick at Harvard during the war, and when he went to MIT, he convinced Lick to go there too. When Beranek hired Lick at BBN, it wasn't so much Lick's background in psychoacoustics but his interest in human-machine interaction that Beranek thought was interesting. Beranek sensed that consulting jobs would pick up in the business of helping companies build machines that were more efficient amplifiers of human labor, which meant bringing about some kind of compatibility between humans and machines. “I didn't know how big a business it was,” Beranek later recalled. “But I thought it was a good supplement to what we were doing.”

Lick, of course, had thought it through more fully. He believed the future of scientific research was going to be linked to high-speed computers, and he thought computing was a good field for BBN to enter. He had been at BBN for less than a year when he told Beranek he'd like to buy a computer. By way of persuasion, Lick stressed that the computer he had in mind was a very modern machine—its programs and data were punched on paper tape rather than the conventional stacks of IBM cards.

“What will it cost?” Beranek asked him.

“Around $25,000.”

“That's a lot of money,” Beranek replied. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I don't know.”

Licklider was convinced the company would be able to get contracts from the government to do basic research using computers. The $25,000, he assured Beranek, wouldn't be wasted.

None of the company's three principals knew much about computers. Beranek knew that Lick, by contrast, was almost evangelistic in his belief that computers would change not only the way people thought about problems but the way problems were solved. Beranek's faith in Licklider won the day. “I decided it was worth the risk to spend $25,000 on an unknown machine for an unknown purpose,” Beranek said. The computer he purchased for Lick was an LGP-30, manufactured in 1958 by Royal-McBee, a subsidiary of the Royal Typewriter Company. It had a drum memory and was slow even by the standards of its day. Yet Lick went straight to work tinkering with it, using it for lengthy statistical calculations and psychoacoustics experiments.

Not long after the computer arrived, Ken Olsen stopped by to see the Royal-McBee machine and to tell BBN about the computer he was building at his new company, Digital Equipment. Olsen wanted to lend Beranek a prototype of the machine, which he called the PDP-1, so BBN engineers could take a look at it. Beranek agreed. But the computer measured four feet by eight feet, and there were few doorways at BBN through which to squeeze it. So it was set up in the lobby. A month or so later, after everyone had a chance to play with it, BBN sent it back to Olsen with recommendations for fine-tuning. When the PDP-1 went on the market for slightly less than $150,000, BBN bought the first one.

The presence of the PDP-1 and the work Licklider was doing with it attracted a number of leading computer scientists to BBN. The firm had also become well known as a place whose hiring philosophy was to recruit MIT dropouts. The idea was that if they could get into MIT they were smart, and if they dropped out, you could get them cheaper. Beranek gave Lick a great deal of freedom to hire whomever he pleased, and Licklider did just that, occasionally forgetting to tell Beranek. “I was wandering around the building one day to see what was going on in the computer side, and I saw two strange guys sitting in one of the large rooms there,” Beranek said. (Lick would have been happy to wear a suit to a picnic, but his hirees were decidedly less formal.) Beranek had no idea who the two men were. “I walked up to the first fellow and said, ‘Who are you?' and he said, ‘Who are you?'” The two young men, it turned out, were friends of Licklider's from MIT—Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, two of the most prominent figures in the emerging field of artificial intelligence.

The PDP-1 had computing power roughly equivalent to today's pocket organizers and a little less memory. People at BBN kept the computer going day and night doing interactive programming. They even built a time-sharing system around it, dividing the screen for four simultaneous users. The time-sharing demonstration was a success, and BBN decided to start a time-sharing service in the Boston area by placing terminals throughout the city. Soon, however, General Electric mounted a similar effort and quickly stole the bulk of BBN's time-sharing business.

The presence of an accessible computer inspired a change in the company. Everyone began thinking up things that could be done with it. One BBN scientist, Jordan Baruch, decided hospitals could use computers to keep more accurate information on patients, so he set out to computerize the record handling at Massachusetts General Hospital. Lick and others began exploring ways in which computers could transform libraries. But computers in the early 1960s were still too underpowered to do much.

By this time, BBN had begun to concentrate seriously on computer technology. The richly academic atmosphere at BBN earned the consulting firm a reputation as “the third university” in Cambridge. “I had the policy that every person we hired had to be better than the previous people,” said Beranek. Next to MIT and Harvard, BBN became one of the most attractive places to work in the Boston area. Some people even considered it better than the universities because there was no teaching obligation and no worry over earning tenure. It was a rarefied environment—the cognac of the research business.

The firm's architectural-acoustics division went through a crisis in the early 1960s, when Beranek was hired to design the acoustics for the new Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall) at New York's Lincoln Center. Both Beranek and the chief architect were criticized for overlooking certain acoustical principles important in designing concert halls. After many attempts at minor adjustment, it became clear that the situation was hopeless. The problem had to be solved by brute force: The walls and balconies were torn out, along with the ceiling—ten thousand tons of building material in all—and carted to dumps. The repair took several years and millions of dollars to carry out, under the supervision of a new consultant. In its exhaustive coverage of the problems, the
New
York Times
focused its attention on Leo Beranek.

If BBN hadn't already diversified into computer research, the Lincoln Center debacle could have spelled its end. By the mid-1960s, however, the company's offices had expanded into a row of low, fairly nondescript buildings, mostly old warehouses that stood along a quiet side street near Fresh Pond on Cambridge's western edge. The offices had a casual architectural uniformity best described as low-rent modernism—Mondrian without the colors. These were stripped-down, spare, boxlike buildings whose flat roofs, few windows, and thin walls exuded simplicity and economy in design. Four of the buildings had been built for other purposes, mainly as warehouse space, before BBN bought and converted them into offices, shops, and laboratories. Building Number 2 was designed by Bolt himself and had a couple of unusual features: Its foundation “floated” in the Cambridge mud, effectively isolating the entire structure from external vibrations; and it was designed for the kind of people BBN was hiring—academicians—whom Bolt expected to fill their offices with books. Therefore he designed the new building to withstand an unusual amount of weight. There were corridors and enclosed footbridges between all of the BBN buildings, making it possible to follow a kind of meandering path through the complete row without going outside during the winter. For a while, BBN depended on borrowed steam piped in from an adjacent laundry to heat some of the quarters.

Among the computer researchers were Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert, who were working on educational applications. Papert was a consultant to BBN for about four years in the late 1960s. While there, he conceived of and made the first rough design of a programming language that would be accessible to school-age children. The idea was adopted as a research theme by BBN's education group, which Feurzeig ran, and the language came to be called LOGO.

While the acousticians usually came to work in jackets and ties, the atmosphere on the computer side was decidedly more relaxed. “When we got into the computer business we had the strangest people working for us,” said Beranek. He appreciated the brilliance of the people Lick hired but seldom felt comfortable around them. He recalled being invited to a New Year's Eve party at the home of a computer engineer around 1965. “It was like going to the Addams Family house,” Beranek said. “They were all in bare feet. The women were wearing tight-fitting clothing. I showed up with a tie on and had to take it off.”

Frank Heart was a notable exception. Conservative in his attire and prone to caution in general, Heart was at that time a computer systems engineer at MIT's Lincoln Lab. In 1966 BBN embarked on a campaign to hire him for its hospital computer project. Heart was an engineer with a reputation for making things happen. Tell him you wanted something built and, by god, you would have it. But Heart was also hardheaded and not easy to pry away from Lincoln.

A self-described “overprotected Jewish kid from Yonkers,” Heart was bookish and, in high school, a bit of a nerd. Frank wanted desperately to attend MIT, which posed a problem for his parents, who were of modest means. (Through the Depression, Heart's father managed to keep his job as an engineer for Otis Elevator.) The thought of sending her only son to a school so far away was particularly difficult for Frank's mother, who did most of the overprotecting. MIT admitted him in 1947, but with a scholarship so small as to guarantee continued financial struggles for his parents.

Following the example set by his father, who built elevator control systems, Frank had decided to become an electrical engineer before entering MIT. To ease the financial strain on his family, he enrolled in a five-year master's degree program, in which work and school were combined in alternate semesters. He worked one summer at a General Electric factory testing large power transformers. “That was something you want to do just once,” Heart recalled. In his second year, he chose to specialize in power engineering—the design of large-scale electrical systems, such as power plants, building transformers, generators, and motors.

Then he discovered computers. In 1951, Heart's senior year, MIT offered its first course ever in computer programming, taught by a visiting professor named Gordon Welchman. Heart signed up. “It was an unbelievable revelation to me that a thing like a computer could exist,” Heart said. He dropped out of the work-study program, a decision that shocked many people because it was such a difficult program to get into. “I got all sorts of nasty letters from MIT and G.E.” But he had caught the computer bug and never looked back.

Thanks to Welchman's introduction, Heart became so interested in computers that he earned his bachelor's degree one term early and finished his master's degree while working as a research assistant on the Whirlwind Project. Whirlwind controlled a radar defense system for tracking aircraft. A radar (
RA
dio
D
etection
A
nd
R
anging) system measures electromagnetic pulses reflected from an object to provide information concerning its direction and distance. Jamming devices can destroy data from a single radar, but an array of radars can compensate if they are working in concert with a computer. Whirlwind gave Heart his first taste of programming in a real-time environment. When Whirlwind was transferred to Lincoln Lab, Heart was transferred with it. “It was the most painless kind of job change one could imagine,” Heart said.