The Freedom to Grow

Freshman Seminar

When Kleinrock was able to message a friend over the ARPAnet to retrieve his shaver, the stage was set for the ARPAnet to become the internet today for communication, commerce, and information. As it seems, when products are developed, oftentimes they are used less for their intended purposes and more to solve pertinent problems. For example, super glue was developed initially for gun sights. And then its adhesiveness was discovered! It became more useful for fixing broken parts and getting fingers stuck together. Using new technologies for accomplishing tasks validates inventions and gives them a higher purpose past its original, intended use.

This use of ARPAnet and freedom to use ARPAnet led to a dramatically important precedent: the casualness of the internet. The internet is not a formal place; it feels like an extension of our every day lives full of work and play. But, this culture could not have been possible without the academics who worked on the ARPAnet outside of the military structure that it had been initially developed under. The developers started off by giving it a light-hearted and open feel, as evidenced even by RFC, which, while setting the standards for the internet, did so not as an authority, but as a peer, requesting suggestions and, well, comments.

This informality, of course, did translate into modern-day trolling. So, if you’re ever angered by YouTube comment trolls, it seems like you can blame the developers’ flaming each other. Flame wars began over everything, as they do today (peep Reddit). Even when the problems were big, the flame wars were disproportionate. Developers would fight over everything from address headers to the infamous Big Endian/Little Endian debate (fun fact: no one won). And, yet, while flame wars and trolling are representative of the human urge to fight, they also represent how open and free the internet has been from the beginning. From the get go, the internet has been about being useful, whether that’s with messaging or transferring files. This culture allowed it to grow and develop and allowed users to use it as a platform to develop on.

Take the Space Industry, for example. Rockets require massive amounts of technology and high capital costs. This means that growth and development is slow. Safety standards slow it down even further. The only recently retired Space Shuttle was using technology from the 80s, having never reached its target of bringing flight costs to less than $25,000 a flight at a frequency of 20 times a year. In fact, it barely hit 10% of either of the latter target. Now, of course, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and international organizations like ISRO are finally bringing competition to the table, but the growth is still slow. Most of the development was driven by the government and government contracts because of the high barriers of entry. On the other hand, the internet was designed so that anyone with a computer could get on and improve it/develop on it.

So that’s what they did. People like BBN engineers who were able to mess with “loop tests” and spook telephone repair men by telling them where lines were down from across the country were the pioneers in developing technologies; people just playing around and messing with stuff because they have the freedom and will to do so.

 

ARPAnet – Piece by Piece

Uncategorized

I am currently taking a seminar taught by Dean Michael Smith and Prof. Jim Waldo called “What is the Internet, and What Will It Become?”. Let me start off by saying that this in itself is extremely cool. I can’t believe that, as a freshman, in my first semester, I’d have two amazing professors, both of whom have years of experience in Computer Science. As a potential CS Concentrator, I can’t imagine having a better start to my education. But, hey, it’s Harvard, am I right?

For the seminar, we’ve had to read the book Where the Wizard’s Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hefner and Matthew Lyon. This book explores the history of the internet, starting with the room-sized computers with batch processing and moving across time to now. While Al Gore may have (unintentionally) claimed to have invented the internet in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, the book compares the creation of the internet to the construction of a medieval cathedral: everyone puts down a few bricks and anyone can claim credit for putting down the most important bricks, but ultimately it’s a slow process driven by motivated people.

That’s exactly what the ARPAnet was: a system slowly designed and built by individuals and teams who were passionate about their work. First commissioned by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), the ARPAnet was the original “internet”, as a network of computers around the nation. The idea was to have a real-time, reliable, and efficient system of connecting computers across the nation. While this seems like a natural step in the evolution of computers, it, in fact, took a lot of convincing.

At the 1967 meeting called by Bob Taylor, Director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), in Ann Arbor, scientists viewed a national network of computers as frivolous and unnecessary. The biggest issue on their mind was the idea that all the processing for the network would be conducted on the host’s computer. This meant that the already limited processing power would be eaten into. That’s when Wes Clark, from Washington University who didn’t even really like the idea of a network, realized that a sub-network could be created that would be dedicated to routing. This idea took off. And, at the next symposium in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the idea of a network began to gather enthusiasm. Small steps, such as this one, slowly built up to the development of the ARPAnet, and the eventual contracting of the system to Bolt Beranek and Newman.

This process was driven by a few key individuals in particular. Bob Taylor was one of the leaders in managing the creation of ARPAnet. He was the first to pitch it to Herzfeld, who headed ARPA, and hired all the key players. He wanted to increase efficiency, bring down costs, and, simply, do something cool.

Joseph Licklider, a former Harvard professor, pioneered the idea that humans and computers would be at a point of intersection, with close interactions and a sort of “symbiosis”. He also led much of the development and recruitment of the team that ultimately put together the ARPAnet.

Donald Davies and Paul Baran, a Brit and American respectively, coincidentally produced the same sort of work: the idea of packet-switching. Packet-switching allowed for information to be essentially broken up and reassembled Ikea-style down a network. This increases efficiency both in costs and in usage of cables; cables don’t have to be held open for the information. While both hit several roadblocks in the implementation of their ideas, their research revolutionized networking and routing.

The development of the internet is characterized by a lot of people putting together a lot of small parts of a giant puzzle. In fact, this sort of mimics the culture of the internet today with crowd-sourcing and the burgeoning sharing economy. It’s fascinating to see how organically the internet was constructed, less as a product that was to be perfected and sold, and more as an ongoing, developing system that keeps growing and improving.