The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 69

Because he had been born prematurely, Cerf was hearing impaired, and he began using a hearing aid at age thirteen. Around that time he also started wearing a coat and tie to school and carrying a briefcase. “I didn’t want to fit in with everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to look different, be noticed. That was a very effective way to do it, and it was better than wearing a nose ring, which I figured my Dad would not have put up with in the 1950’s.”¹⁰³

In high school he became best friends with Crocker, and they spent weekends together doing science projects and playing 3-D chess. After graduating from Stanford and working for IBM for two years, he became a doctoral student at UCLA, where he worked in Kleinrock’s group. There he met Bob Kahn, and they remained close after Kahn went to work at BBN and then ARPA.

When Kahn embarked on his internetwork endeavor in the spring of 1973, he visited Cerf and described all the packet-switched networks that had sprung up in addition to the ARPANET. “How are we going to hook these different kinds of packet-nets to each other?” Kahn asked. Cerf seized on the challenge, and the two of them launched into a three-month burst of collaboration that would lead to the creation of the Internet. “He and I clicked instantly on this,” Kahn later said. “Vint is the kind of guy who likes to roll up his sleeves and say let’s get on with it. I thought that was a breath of fresh air.”¹⁰⁴

They began by organizing a meeting at Stanford in June 1973 to gather ideas. As a result of this collaborative approach, Cerf later said, the solution “turned out to be the open protocol that everybody had a finger in at one time or another.”¹⁰⁵ But most of the work was done as a duet by Kahn and Cerf, who holed up for intense sessions at Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto or at a hotel next to Dulles Airport. “Vint liked to get up and draw these spider drawings,” Kahn recalled. “Often times we would have a conversation back and forth and he would say, ‘Let me draw a picture of that.’?”¹⁰⁶

One day in October 1973, Cerf made a simple sketch in a San Francisco hotel lobby that codified their approach. It showed various networks like the ARPANET and PRNET, each with lots of host computers connected to them, and a set of “gateway” computers that would pass packets between each of the networks. Finally, they spent an entire weekend together at the ARPA office near the Pentagon, where they stayed up almost two nights straight and then ended up at a nearby Marriott for a triumphal breakfast.

They rejected the idea that the networks could each keep their own different protocols, although that would have been easier to sell. They wanted a common protocol. That would allow the new internetwork to scale up explosively, since any computer or network using the new protocol could link in without requiring a translation system. The traffic between ARPANET and any other network should be seamless. So they came up with the idea of having every computer adopt the same method and template for addressing its packets. It was as if every postcard mailed in the world had to have a four-line address specifying street number and city and country using the Roman alphabet.

The result was an Internet Protocol (IP) that specified how to put the packet’s destination in its header and helped determine how it would travel through networks to get there. Layered above it was a higher-level Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that instructed how to put the packets back together in the right order, checked to see if any of them was missing, and requested retransmission of any information that had been lost. These became known as TCP/IP. Kahn and Cerf published them as a paper called “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection.” The Internet was born.

On the twentieth anniversary of the ARPANET in 1989, Kleinrock and Cerf and many of the other pioneers gathered at UCLA, where the network’s first node had been installed. There were poems and songs and doggerel written to celebrate the occasion. Cerf performed a parody of Shakespeare, titled “Rosencrantz and Ethernet,” that raised to a Hamlet-like question the choice between packet switching and dedicated circuits:

All the world’s a net! And all the data in it merely packets

come to store-and-forward in the queues a while and then are

heard no more. ’Tis a network waiting to be switched!

To switch or not to switch? That is the question:

Whether ’tis wiser in the net to suffer

The store and forward of stochastic networks,

Or to raise up circuits against a sea of packets,

And by dedication serve them? ¹⁰⁷

A generation later, in 2014, Cerf was working at Google in Washington, DC, still enjoying himself and marveling at the wonders they had wrought by creating the Internet. Wearing Google Glass, he noted that every year brings something new. “Social networks—I joined Facebook as an experiment—business apps, mobile, new things keep piling onto the Internet,” he said. “It has scaled up a million times over. Not many things can do that without breaking. And yet those old protocols we created are doing just fine.”¹⁰⁸

NETWORKED CREATIVITY

So who does deserve the most credit for inventing the Internet? (Hold the inevitable Al Gore jokes. We will get to his role—yes, he did have one—in chapter 10.) As with the question of who invented the computer, the answer is that it was a case of collaborative creativity. As Paul Baran later explained to the technology writers Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, using a beautiful image that applies to all innovation:

The process of technological development is like building a cathedral. 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.¹⁰⁹

The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas. The result of such peer sharing was a network that facilitated peer sharing. This was not mere happenstance. The Internet was built with the belief that power should be distributed rather than centralized and that any authoritarian diktats should be circumvented. As Dave Clark, one of the early participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force, put it, “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”¹¹⁰ The result was a networked commons, a place where innovations could be crowdsourced and open-source.

Innovation is not a loner’s endeavor, and the Internet was a prime example. “With computer networks, the loneliness of research is supplanted by the richness of shared research,” proclaimed the first issue of ARPANET News, the new network’s official newsletter.

The network pioneers J. C. R. Licklider and Bob Taylor realized that the Internet, because of how it was built, had an inherent tendency to encourage peer-to-peer connections and the formation of online communities. This opened up beautiful possibilities. “Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity,” they wrote in a visionary 1968 paper titled “The Computer as a Communication Device.” Their optimism verged on utopianism. “There will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information, with all its fields and disciplines, will be open to him.”¹¹¹