The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 67

The ARPANET ended up representing an interesting conjunction of military and academic interests. It was funded by the Defense Department, which tended to want hierarchal command systems with centralized controls. But the Pentagon had delegated the design of the network to a bunch of academics, some of whom were avoiding being drafted and most of whom had a distrust of centralized authority. Because they opted for a structure of limitless nodes, each with its own router, rather than one based on a few centralized hubs, the network would be hard to control. “My bias was always to build decentralization into the net,” Taylor said. “That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them.”⁸⁸ By picking people like Taylor to build its network, the Pentagon was spawning one that it would not be able to fully control.

There was yet another layer of irony. The decentralized and distributed architecture meant that the network would be more reliable. It could even withstand a nuclear attack. Building a resilient and attack-proof military command-and-control system was not what motivated the ARPA researchers. It wasn’t even in the back of their minds. But that was one reason they ended up getting a steady stream of Pentagon and congressional funding for the project.

Even after the ARPANET morphed into the Internet in the early 1980s, it would continue to serve both a military and a civilian purpose. Vint Cerf, a gentle and reflective thinker who helped create the Internet, recalled, “I wanted to demonstrate that our technology could survive a nuclear attack.” So in 1982 he ran a series of tests that replicated a nuclear attack artificially. “There were a number of such simulations or demonstrations like that, some of which were extremely ambitious. They involved the Strategic Air Command. At one point we put airborne packet radios in the field while using the airborne systems to sew together fragments of Internet that had been segregated by a simulated nuclear attack.” Radia Perlman, one of the foremost women network engineers, developed at MIT protocols that would assure network robustness in the face of malicious attacks, and she helped Cerf come up with ways to partition and reconstruct the ARPANET when necessary to make it more survivable.⁸⁹

This interplay of military and academic motives became ingrained in the Internet. “The design of both the ARPANET and the Internet favored military values, such as survivability, flexibility, and high performance, over commercial goals, such as low cost, simplicity, or consumer appeal,” the technology historian Janet Abbate noted. “At the same time, the group that designed and built ARPA’s networks was dominated by academic scientists, who incorporated their own values of collegiality, decentralization of authority, and open exchange of information into the system.”⁹⁰ These academic researchers of the late 1960s, many of whom associated with the antiwar counterculture, created a system that resisted centralized command. It would route around any damage from a nuclear attack but also around any attempt to impose control.

ONE GIANT LEAP: THE ARPANET HAS LANDED, OCTOBER 1969

In the summer of 1968, when much of the world, from Prague to Chicago, was being rocked by political unrest, Larry Roberts sent out a solicitation for bids to companies that might want to build the minicomputers that would be sent to each research center to serve as the routers, or Interface Message Processors, of the proposed ARPANET. His plan incorporated the packet-switching concept of Paul Baran and Donald Davies, the suggestion for standardized IMPs proposed by Wes Clark, the theoretical insights of J. C. R. Licklider, Les Earnest, and Leonard Kleinrock, and the contributions of many other inventors.

Of the 140 companies that received the request, only a dozen decided to submit bids. IBM, for example, didn’t. It doubted that the IMPs could be built at a reasonable price. Roberts convened a committee meeting in Monterey, California, to assess the bids that had been submitted, and Al Blue, the compliance officer, took pictures of each with measuring sticks showing how thick they were.

Raytheon, the large Boston-area defense contractor that had been cofounded by Vannevar Bush, emerged as the frontrunner, and even entered into price negotiations with Roberts. But Bob Taylor stepped in and expressed the view, already being pushed by Wes Clark, that the contract should go to BBN, which was not burdened with a multilayer corporate bureaucracy. “I said that the corporate culture between Raytheon and the research universities would be bad, like oil and water,” Taylor recalled.⁹¹ As Clark put it, “Bob overruled the committee.” Roberts went along. “Raytheon had a good proposal that competed equally with BBN, and the only distinguishing thing in the long run for my final decision was that BBN had a tighter team organized in a way that I thought would be more effective,” he recalled.⁹²

In contrast to the bureaucracy-laden Raytheon, BBN had a nimble band of brilliant engineers, led by two refugees from MIT, Frank Heart and Robert Kahn.⁹³ They helped to improve Roberts’s proposal by specifying that when a packet was passed from one IMP to the next, the sending IMP would keep it stored until it got an acknowledgment from the receiving IMP, and it would resend the message if the acknowledgment didn’t come promptly. That became a key to the net’s reliability. At each step, the design was being improved by collective creativity.

Just before Christmas, Roberts surprised many by announcing the selection of BBN rather than Raytheon. Senator Ted Kennedy sent the usual telegram that goes to a constituent who lands a big federal project. In it, he congratulated BBN for being chosen to build the Interfaith Message Processor, which in some ways was an apt description of the ecumenical role of the Interface Message Processors.⁹⁴

Roberts selected four research centers to be the first ARPANET nodes: UCLA, where Len Kleinrock worked; Stanford Research Institute (SRI), with the visionary Douglas Engelbart; the University of Utah, with Ivan Sutherland; and the University of California at Santa Barbara. They were given the task of figuring out how their big “host” computers would connect to the standardized IMPs that would be shipped to them. Like typical senior professors, the researchers at these centers enlisted a motley crew of graduate students to do the work.

The members of this young work team gathered in Santa Barbara to figure out how to proceed, and they discovered a verity that would remain true even in the age of digital social networks: it was useful—and fun—to get together in person, interfacing in the literal sense of that word. “There was a kind of cocktail-party phenomenon where you find you have a lot of rapport with each other,” recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites.

The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent.

Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics.