The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 68

So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.⁹⁵ And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.” His desire to be deferential kept him up at nights, literally. “I was living with my girlfriend and her baby from a previous relationship at her parents’ house. The only place to work at night without disturbing people was the bathroom, and I would stand there naked and scribble down notes.”⁹⁶

Crocker realized that he needed an unassertive name for the list of suggestions and practices. “To emphasize the informal nature, I hit upon this silly little idea of calling every one of them a ‘Request for Comments’—no matter whether it really was a request.” It was the perfect phrase to encourage Internet-era collaboration—friendly, not bossy, inclusive, and collegial. “It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement,” Crocker wrote forty years later.⁹⁷

The first RFC went out on April 7, 1969, mailed in old-fashioned envelopes through the postal system. (There was no such thing as email, since they hadn’t invented the network yet.) In a warm and casual tone, devoid of any officiousness, Crocker set forth the task of figuring out how the host computer at each institution should connect to the new network. “During the summer of 1968, representatives from the initial four sites met several times to discuss the host software,” he wrote. “I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected.”⁹⁸ The people who received RFC 1 felt that they were being included in a fun process rather than being dictated to by a bunch of protocol czars. It was a network they were talking about, so it made sense to try to loop everyone in.

The RFC process pioneered open-source development of software, protocols, and content. “That culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has,” Crocker said later.⁹⁹ Even more broadly, it became the standard for collaboration in the digital age. Thirty years after RFC 1, Vint Cerf wrote a philosophical RFC called “The Great Conversation” that began, “A long time ago, in a network far, far away . . .” After describing the informal way RFCs had begun, Cerf continued, “Hiding in the history of the RFCs is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work.”¹⁰⁰ It was a grand statement, and it would have seemed overblown except that it was true.

The RFCs produced a set of host-to-IMP standards by the end of August 1969, just when the first IMP was shipped to Kleinrock’s lab. When it arrived at the UCLA loading dock, a dozen people were there to greet it: Crocker, Kleinrock, a few other team members, and Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, who had brought champagne. They were surprised to see that the IMP was the size of a refrigerator and was clad, as per the specifications of the military machine that it was, in battleship-gray steel. It was wheeled into the computer room, plugged in, and started right up. BBN had done great work, delivering on time and on budget.

One machine does not a network make. It was not until a month later, when a second IMP was delivered to SRI on the edge of the Stanford campus, that the ARPANET could truly get up and running. On October 29 the connection was ready to be made. The event was appropriately casual. It had none of the drama of the “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” that had occurred on the moon a few weeks earlier, with a half billion people watching on television. Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto. He typed in “L.” The guy at SRI told him that it had been received. Then he typed in “O.” That, too, was confirmed. When he typed in “G,” the system hit a memory snag because of an auto-complete feature and crashed. Nevertheless, the first message had been sent across the ARPANET, and if it wasn’t as eloquent as “The Eagle has landed” or “What has God wrought,” it was suitable in its understated way: “Lo.” As in “Lo and behold.” In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, “22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.”¹⁰¹

It was thus that in the second half of 1969—amid the static of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, Vietnam War protests, Charles Manson, the Chicago Eight trial, and Altamont—the culmination was reached for three historic enterprises, each in the making for almost a decade. NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor. And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers. Only the first of these (perhaps the least historically significant of them?) made headlines.

THE INTERNET

The ARPANET was not yet the Internet. It was just one network. Within a few years, there were other packet-switched networks that were similar but not interconnected. For example, engineers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) wanted a local-area network to connect the office workstations they were designing in the early 1970s, and a recent Harvard PhD there named Bob Metcalfe created a way to use coaxial cable (the type that plugs into cable TV boxes) to create a high-bandwidth system that he named “Ethernet.” It was modeled on a wireless network developed in Hawaii known as ALOHAnet, which sent packet data through UHF and satellite signals. In addition, there was a packet radio network in San Francisco, known as PRNET, and also a satellite version called SATNET. Despite their similarities, these packet-switched networks were not compatible or interoperable.

In early 1973 Robert Kahn set out to remedy that. There should be a way, he decided, to allow all these networks to interconnect, and he was in a position to make that happen. He had left BBN, where he had helped develop the IMPs, to become a project manager at ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office. Having worked on the ARPANET and then PRNET, he made it his mission to create a method to connect them and other packet networks, a system that he and his colleagues began calling an “internetwork.” After a while, that word got shortened a bit, to “internet.”

To be his partner in this endeavor, Kahn tapped Vint Cerf, who had been Steve Crocker’s sidekick on the group writing Requests for Comments and figuring out the protocols of the ARPANET. Cerf was raised in Los Angeles, where his father worked for a company that made engines for the Apollo space program. Like Gordon Moore, he grew up playing with a chemistry set in the days when they were delightfully dangerous. “We had things like powdered magnesium, powdered aluminum, and sulfur and glycerin and potassium permanganate,” he recalled. “When you pour them together, they burst into flame.” In fifth grade he was bored with math, so his teacher gave him a seventh-grade algebra book. “I spent the whole summer working every single problem in the book,” he said. “I liked the word problems the best because they were like little mystery stories. You had to figure out who ‘x’ was, and I was always curious to find out what’s ‘x’ going to turn out to be.” He also became deeply immersed in science fiction, especially the stories of Robert Heinlein, and began his lifelong practice of rereading J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy almost every year.¹⁰²