Where Wizards Stay Up Late (32 page)

The TCP and IP standards weren't the only major renovation to networking in the early 1980s. For years, every e-mail program written for the
ARPANET
had depended on the original file-transfer protocol to serve as its barge for schlepping the mail back and forth. It may have been a neat hack to attach the mail commands to the file-transfer protocol at first, but the processing of e-mail had grown more complicated. In a message to his colleagues in the MsgGroup mailing list one day in late August 1982, Postel said, “If you really go look at the FTP spec, you will see that the mail commands are really some sort of wart.” Postel and a lot of others felt it was time to build a completely separate transfer mechanism for mail.

Since the network was undergoing massive rearrangement anyway with the switch to TCP/IP, this seemed an appropriate time to bring out the new standard. Postel and his colleagues called it the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP). It clarified existing practices, while adding a few new control features.

At the same time, the growth of the network gave rise to a new problem. “When we got to about two thousand hosts, that's when things really started to come apart,” said Craig Partridge, a programmer at BBN. “Instead of having one big mainframe with twenty thousand people on it, suddenly we were getting inundated with individual machines.” Every host machine had a given name, “and everyone wanted to be named Frodo,” Partridge recalled.

Sorting out the Frodos of the Internet wasn't unlike sorting out the Joneses of Cleveland or the Smiths of Smithville. Where one lived, precisely, was important in differentiating who one was. For years, sorting this out was among the most troublesome, messiest issues for the Internet, until at last a group chiseled out a workable scheme, called the domain name system, or DNS.

The core of the DNS team was Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris at ISI, and BBN's Craig Partridge. They spent three months working out the details of the new addressing scheme and in November 1983 came forward with two RFCs describing the domain name system. “DNS was a very significant change in the way we thought about the system being organized,” said Postel. “Tree-branching” was the guiding metaphor. Each address would have a hierarchical structure. From the trunk to the branches, and outward to the leaves, every address would include levels of information representing, in progression, a smaller, more specific part of the network address.

But that sparked a debate about the sequence of the hierarchy; what should come first or last. Postel and others finally decided on a specific-to-general addressing scheme. The Internet community also argued back and forth over what to name the domains, delaying any implementation for about a year. It was asserted by some, unconvincingly, that domain names should reflect specific funding sources—MIT, DARPA, for example. Eventually, a committee agreed on seven “top-level” domains: edu, com, gov, mil, net, org, and int. Now there could be seven Frodos: a computer named Frodo at a university (edu), one at a government site (gov), a company (com), a military site (mil), a nonprofit organization (org), a network service provider (net), or an international treaty entity (int).

DARPA began pressuring people to adopt DNS addresses in 1985. In January 1986 a grand summit meeting took place on the West Coast, bringing together representatives of all the major networks. By the time the summit was over, everyone had agreed that yes, they really believed in the DNS concept. “And yes, here was how we were going to make it work,” Partridge recalled, “And yes, we have the technology to make it all fly.”

The first hint Cerf got that the Internet was going to be embraced by a world outside the scientific and academic communities came in 1989, when he walked on to the exhibition floor at Interop, a trade show started by Dan Lynch in 1986 to promote interconnectivity through TCP/IP. In its first couple of years, Interop was attended by a few hundred hardcore networking people. By 1989 the show was teeming with men and women in business attire. “It was an epiphany to walk into Interop and see the major money being spent on exhibitions with huge demonstrations set up,” Cerf said. “I realized, oh my God, people are spending serious money on this.” The exhibitors had names like Novell, Synoptics, and Network General. “We started looking at the network statistics and realized we had a rocket on our hands.” For years Cerf had seen the Internet as a successful, satisfying experiment. Occasionally he had hoped the Internet might reach a wider world of users. Now here was evidence that it was doing just that.

By this time, virtually everyone was using TCP/IP. And there was an ever-increasing infrastructure built upon TCP/IP in Europe. TCP/IP was so widespread and so many people depended on it, that taking it down and starting over seemed unthinkable. By virtue of its quiet momentum, TCP/IP had prevailed over the official OSI standard. Its success provided an object lesson in technology and how it advances. “Standards should be discovered, not decreed,” said one computer scientist in the TCP/IP faction. Seldom has it worked any other way.

By the late 1980s the Internet was no longer a star with the
ARPANET
its center; it was a mesh, much like the
ARPANET
itself. The
NSFNET
program had democratized networks as even
CSNET
hadn't. Now anyone on a college campus with an Internet connection could become an Internet user. The
NSFNET
was fast becoming the Internet's spine, running on lines that were more than twenty-five times faster than
ARPANET
lines. Users now had a choice between connecting to the
ARPANET
or to the
NSFNET
backbone. Many chose the latter, not only for its speed but because it was so much easier to connect to.

As the 1990s approached, the number of computers in the world that were connected to one another via the
NSFNET
far outstripped the number of computers connected to one another via the
ARPANET
. The
ARPANET
was now just one of hundreds of ARPA Internet networks, and a dinosaur, unable to evolve as quickly as the rest of the Internet.

Bob Kahn, DARPA's sole remaining champion of networking, had left the agency in 1985 to form the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a nonprofit company whose charter was to foster research and development for a “national information infrastructure.” The people now running DARPA weren't particularly interested in networking. In their view, all the interesting problems had been solved. Moreover, the agency was distracted by President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program.

The
ARPANET
itself, which cost ARPA $14 million a year to run, looked arthritic next to the higher-speed
NSFNET
. DARPA management decided the
ARPANET
had outlived its usefulness. It was time to shut it down.

Mark Pullen, a DARPA program manager who now ran the networking project, was given the task of decommissioning the
ARPANET
. Exactly who gave the order from within DARPA's higher reaches was never made quite clear. “No one wanted to be the ghoul that turned off the
ARPANET
,” Pullen said, “so I became the source of the policy.” Pullen's plan was to pull sites off the
ARPANET
and put them on the
NSFNET
backbone.

It was hard telling Bob Kahn about the plan to decommission the network. Kahn had hired Pullen, and now Pullen played the executioner. “I had a sense he might feel I was turning off his greatest achievement,” Pullen said. “The one that seemed to hurt him worse was when I turned off the old
SATNET
.”
SATNET
was slow and expensive and antiquated. “No doubt he must have felt it was his very own child. For valid reasons. But after he thought about it, he agreed I was doing the right thing.” (As it turned out, the money DARPA saved by turning off the
ARPANET
helped fund Kahn's new project.)

One by one, Pullen turned off the IMPs and TIPs that still lay at the heart of the original network. There was a certain sadness in its demise that called to mind the scene from Arthur C. Clarke's
2001:
A Space Odyssey
where the fictional fifth-generation computer HAL is threatening its mission and has to be dismantled circuit by circuit. As HAL gradually loses its “mind,” it makes pathetic appeals for its “life” to Dave, the astronaut, who is doing the dismantling.

In the case of the
ARPANET
, the network died but its pieces lived on. “It wasn't all that different from the breakup of Ma Bell,” Pullen recalled. “It involved locating clusters of
ARPANET
sites and finding someone to take them over.” In most cases, Pullen transferred each
ARPANET
site to one of the regional networks, and eased the transition by subsidizing the cost for a while. With the exception of two sites that went on to the
MILNET
, all the sites went to one or another of the regional networks. “I never had anyone object all that loudly,” Pullen said. “I think they all knew the time had come.” One site at a time, Pullen found new homes for them. Where there wasn't a home, DARPA and NSF helped create one. Several
ARPANET
sites in Southern California quickly formed their own regional network and called it Los Nettos; it was run by Danny Cohen and Jon Postel. The IMPs themselves were powered down, uncabled, and shipped away. Most were simply junked. Others went into service on the
MILNET
. The Computer Museum in Boston got one, and Len Klein-rock put IMP Number One on display for visitors at UCLA. The last IMP to go was at the University of Maryland. By coincidence, Trusted Information Systems, a company in Maryland where Steve Crocker now worked, was connected to that IMP. Crocker had been there at the birth and he was there at the death.

By the end of 1989, the
ARPANET
was gone. The
NSFNET
and the regional networks it had spawned became the principal backbone. That year, to mark both the
ARPANET
's twentieth anniversary and its passing, UCLA sponsored a symposium and called it “Act One.”

In his speech, Danny Cohen found a source of inspiration, and he said this:

“In the beginning ARPA created the
ARPANET
.

“And the
ARPANET
was without form and void.

“And darkness was upon the deep.

“And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, ‘Let there be a protocol,' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.

“And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more protocols,'and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.

“And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more networks,'and it was so.”

The party was BBN's idea: gather a couple of dozen key players in Boston and celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the installation of the first
ARPANET
node at UCLA. By now, the Internet had grown far beyond a research experiment. As more people discovered its utility, it was becoming a household word. The Net promised to be to the twenty-first century what the telephone had been to the twentieth. Its existence was already reaching into nearly every aspect of American culture—from publishing to socializing. For many, e-mail had become an indispensable part of daily life. Housebound seniors used it to find companionship; some far-flung families used it as their glue. More people by the day were logging-on to conduct business or find entertainment on the Net. Analysts pronounced the Internet the next great marketing opportunity.

The takeoff was just beginning. In 1990, the World Wide Web, a multimedia branch of the Internet, had been created by researchers at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva. Using Tim Berners-Lee's HTTP protocol, computer scientists around the world began making the Internet easier to navigate with point-and-click programs. These browsers were modeled after Berners-Lee's original, and usually based on the CERN code library. One browser in particular, called Mosaic, created in 1993 by a couple of students at University of Illinois, would help popularize the Web and therefore the Net as no software tool had yet done.

The Net of the 1970s had long since been supplanted by something at once more sophisticated and more unwieldy. Yet in dozens of ways, the Net of 1994 still reflected the personalities and proclivities of those who built it. Larry Roberts kept laying pieces of the foundation to the great big rambling house that became the Internet. Frank Heart's pragmatic attitude toward technical invention—build it, throw it out on the Net, and fix it if it breaks—permeated Net sensibility for years afterward. Openness in the protocol process started with Steve Crocker's first RFC for the Network Working Group, and continued into the Internet. While at DARPA, Bob Kahn made a conspicuous choice to maintain openness. Vint Cerf gave the Net its civility. And the creators of the Net still ran the Internet Society and attended meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Just as the party plans got under way, BBN got a new chief executive officer. George Conrades, a high-powered marketing veteran from IBM, had been recruited by BBN's chairman Steve Levy to reshape the company's businesses. Conrades loved the party idea. He seized on it as a perfect marketing vehicle. Conrades was smitten with BBN's pioneering role. BBN was
the
original Internet company, he decided, a claim to fame the firm had yet to exploit. Make the party big and lavish. Rent out the Copley Plaza Hotel. Celebrate the network pioneers as if they had been the first to tread on the moon's surface. Invite computer industry luminaries. And invite the press.

BBN needed the boost. Throughout the 1980s, the company's fortunes had mostly ebbed. As the Internet had grown more popular, BBN, which time and again had failed to commercialize on its research efforts, had slipped into relative obscurity. In 1993 the company lost $32 million on $233 million in sales. The next year wasn't much better, with an $8 million loss on lower sales.

The company had missed its greatest opportunity when it failed to enter the market for routers—of which IMPs were the progenitors. BBN failed to see the potential in routers much as AT&T had refused to acknowledge packet-switching. Anyone wanting to connect a local area network—of which there were now hundreds of thousands—to the Internet needed a router. By 1994, the router business was a multibillion-dollar industry. More than a decade earlier a couple of BBN's own computer guys had tried to push the company into the router business, and they had been brushed off by a marketing vice president.

BBN's troubles went beyond failed market opportunities. In 1980 the federal government accused the company of conspiring to overcharge the government on its contracts during the period from 1972 to 1978, and of altering time sheets to conceal the overcharges. The practice was discovered when, in the course of a routine audit in the late 1970s, BBN officials were less than candid with a government auditor. (“BBN had gotten very arrogant,” said one long-time employee.) A federal investigation lasted more than two years. Auditors moved into the firm's Cambridge headquarters. Senior BBN employees were called before a grand jury. None of the IMP Guys was implicated. But in 1980 two of the company's high-ranking financial officers plea-bargained their way out of a one-hundred-count charge. They were given suspended sentences and fined $20,000 each. The company agreed to pay a $700,000 fine.

At the time, BBN depended on government contracts for nearly 80 percent of its revenues. Given the certainty that all government contract awards to BBN would have been suspended during the course of any lengthy legal defense, had no settlement been reached, the charges could have ruined the company. People in the company felt that the government had overreacted to incorrect accounting practices. BBN, they said, had always given the federal government much more than its money's worth on contract R&D.

The networking group at BBN, only minimally involved in the government investigation, was simultaneously offering proof positive that government-funded science can bear splendid fruit. The
ARPANET
was Exhibit A. Funded entirely by ARPA, its creators given reasonably free rein, the network was evidence of a once-pervasive American trust in science. The network was built in an era when Washington provided a little guidance and a lot of faith.

By 1994, BBN's brush with the government auditors was forgotten. Unfortunately, so was the company's role in building the
ARPANET
. Only those insiders who were acquainted with history associated the company with the newly popular Internet. When Conrades arrived, he decided it was time to polish BBN's image. And a silver-anniversary bash for the
ARPANET
was the perfect opportunity.

The invitation list for the party was as scrutinized as an invitation list for a White House dinner. Some names were obvious, of course; but scores of people had had a hand in building the
ARPANET
, and even more people, from all over the world, had been involved with the Internet. Heart, Walden, and others submitted suggestions.Vice President Al Gore, an advocate of the information superhighway, was invited. So was Ed Markey, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts who had also put the Internet on his political agenda; he accepted the invitation. Bill Gates was invited, although the Microsoft chairman had yet to acknowledge the Internet as a useful tool. He declined. Paul Baran, whose role was minimized at BBN, nearly wasn't invited at all. In time, the list ballooned to five hundred invitees.

Conrades wanted this to be as much a signal for the future as a celebration of the past. He was planning for BBN to expand its somewhat diminished role in Internet-related businesses. BBN already owned and operated NEARnet, the New England regional network. One of his first moves after arriving was to purchase BARRnet, the regional network in the San Francisco Bay Area. And he had his eye on SURAnet, the regional network for the Southeast.

Seeking a lofty theme, the public relations firm that BBN hired to augment its own PR department came up with one: “History of the Future.” It suited Conrades's plans for BBN perfectly. Conrades also hired a production company to put together an elaborate video presentation that would include interviews with a core group of pioneers—Larry Roberts, Bob Kahn, Steve Crocker, Len Kleinrock, Frank Heart, and Vint Cerf.

Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, was now publisher of a computer trade newspaper called
InfoWorld.
He wrote an opinion column on the upcoming event that he titled, “Old Fogies to Duke It Out for Credit at Internet's 25th Anniversary.” “I'll be there to see old friends, to renew some old animosities, and to join in the jockeying for credit—of which there is plenty to go around,” Metcalfe wrote. “I'll begin by making sure partygoers realize that most TCP/IP traffic is carried by Ethernet, which I invented . . . As the party peaks, I'll see how much credit I can grab from Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for the invention of internetworking . . . Failing that, I'll see if I can smile my way into the group photo of the inventors of packet-switching.”

Weeks and days before the event, BBN's public relations firm placed stories in magazines and newspapers.
Newsweek
ran a lengthy piece on the
ARPANET
pioneers, and so did the
Boston Globe.
BBN put together a video news clip, which was aired on more than one hundred local newscasts. Ray Tomlinson, whose scrutiny of his keyboard at an opportune moment had produced the @ sign, was celebrated as a folk hero in a story aired on National Public Radio on the evening of the party.

The guests of honor began arriving on Friday, September 9, and gathered for a reception followed by a press conference at the Copley Plaza that afternoon. As a joke, Wes Clark, now a consultant in New York, pinned Larry Roberts's name badge to his own sport coat. At the press conference, several of the
ARPANET
pioneers, who outnumbered the journalists, delivered speeches. In his speech, Bob Taylor wryly remarked that the people who had been invited had sent their grandfathers instead.

The most notable absence was that of Licklider, who died in 1990, but his wife, Louise, accepted the invitation. Bernie Cosell, the IMP team's ace debugger, who now lived in ruralVirginia and raised sheep (“Too many people, too few sheep,” read Cosell's e-mail signature), was unable to come because of the expense. Others refused. Famously averse to parties, Will Crowther declined the invitation; repeated phone calls from fellow IMP Guys could not change his mind.

At a stand-up Mexican buffet following the press conference, everyone mingled. Some people had seen each other a few days earlier, or a few months earlier, but others hadn't seen each other for years, or even decades. New spouses, old spouses, and premature aging were quietly remarked upon. Larry Roberts, now running a small company that was building a new generation of switch, lived in Woodside, California, a well-to-do community on the San Francisco peninsula. Now fifty-eight, Roberts was on a daily regimen of “smart drugs” (Deprenyl, used to treat Parkinson's, was one; melatonin was another) to regain the powers of concentration he possessed at twenty-eight. With characteristic intensity, he steeped himself in the subject. He read hundreds of research reports and had even produced an “anti-aging” videotape.

In 1983, Taylor had left Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. His departure had sparked a rash of resignations from loyal researchers, who followed him to Digital Equipment Corp., where he set up a research lab just a few miles from Xerox PARC. For years he lived around the corner from Larry Roberts and neither man knew it. One day a piece of mail addressed to Lawrence G. Roberts was misdelivered to Taylor's house, and the two discovered that they lived a few hundred yards apart.

On day two of BBN's fete, Saturday morning, came photo sessions, one after another. First was the official group shot. The group was large, about twenty-five people. When Len Kleinrock missed the first official photo shoot, another had to be arranged. For another pose, the core group of IMP Guys was asked to pose precisely as in the original IMP Guys photo taken in 1969. “Could you guys lose some weight?” Cerf called out as the photographer tried to place everyone in the shot.

Afterward, the scientists were bused two blocks away to the Christian Science Center for a
Wired
magazine shoot. Gamely, the nineteen men squeezed themselves onto a short, narrow bridge at the Center's Mapparium. Being engineers, they couldn't help but offer some advice to the photographer, who was having a little trouble fitting them all in the shot: Try a different angle. Try a different configuration. Try a different lens. Try a different camera. Later, a few in the group grumbled about hangers-on having shown up for the photo, but for the most part, the general good cheer of the weekend was beginning to infect them all.

The multiple paternity claims to the Internet (not only had each man been there at the start but each had made a contribution that he considered immeasurable) came out most noticeably that afternoon during a group interview with the Associated Press. The interview was done over a speakerphone in a suite at the hotel. Kahn, Heart, Engelbart, and Kleinrock sat hunched over the phone as the AP reporter asked questions. Before long the interview transformed into a study in credit management. Taylor arrived late, but not too late to engage in something of a dustup with Bob Kahn, who warned the AP reporter to be certain to distinguish between the early days of the
ARPANET
and the Internet, and that it was the invention of TCP/IP that marked the true beginnings of internetworking. Not true, said Taylor. The Internet's roots most certainly lay with the
ARPANET
. The group around the telephone grew uncomfortable. “How about women?” asked the reporter, perhaps to break the silence. “Are there any female pioneers?” More silence.

The weekend was as noteworthy for who wasn't present as for who was. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, had just moved to Boston from Geneva to join MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. He wasn't invited, nor was Marc Andreessen, the co-programmer of Mosaic, who had just left Illinois to develop a commercial version of his Web browser. Granted, they hadn't played roles in the birth of either the
ARPANET
or the Internet (Andreessen wasn't even born until 1972, after the first
ARPANET
nodes were installed) and couldn't technically be counted as founders. But they were behind the two inventions that were already giving the Net its biggest reach into everyday life.