Looking Back ...
Building a Trail of Interest
A Galactic Network
Creating an Electronic Quilt
Incalculable Impact
Looking Back On Three Decades
Of Internet History
New York, NY --
As reported by George Johnson for the New York Times,
thirty years ago, on Oct. 29, the inaugural message was sent over the first
thin reed of what was to become the Internet. It was nothing so portentous
as "What hath God wrought," the words christening the telegraph in 1844. It
was just the simple word "login."
There were only two nodes on what was then known as the Arpanet, the
precursor to the Internet built by the Defense Department's Advanced
Research Projects Agency. As the story has become enshrined in the folklore,
a U.C.L.A. student named Charley Kline tapped out the letters "l" and "o,"
which were dutifully echoed back by a computer at the Stanford Research
Institute (S.R.I.), a center about 300 miles northwest in what was not yet Silicon
Valley. When he typed the third letter, "g," the S.R.I. computer was
supposed to recognize and complete the full command.
Instead, the letters caused a memory buffer to overflow, bringing down the
system. But it was an exceedingly minor crash, said Bill Duvall, who was
tweaking the connection on the Stanford end. The buffer size was increased
and the first connection was flawlessly made.
"I guess that I really don't care to be known as 'The First Guy to Crash
the Internet,'" Duvall wrote in an E-mail message. What sticks in his mind
is the satisfying feeling of getting the pieces of the complex system to
mesh. The S.R.I. computer had to be fooled into thinking it was talking to a
regular old teletype machine, a "virtual user," which might as well have
been in the same room. Stanford had practiced for the occasion by running
simulations of the network connection. But there is no substitute for the
real thing.
"Quite a bit of thought went into debugging the initial network
connection," Duvall recalled. "When the S.R.I. end came up, I was pretty
happy. I guess that it is a bit like a symphony -- it's the last note that
is remembered, not all of the stuff in between."
No one apparently thought to take a picture. And no one recalls what
messages followed. "It seems like it should have been 'Watson, come here! I
need you!'" Duvall said, referring to Alexander Graham Bell's first, urgent
telephonic command (he had just spilled battery acid). "That would not have
been out of character. But, alas, I really don't remember."
And so the revolution quietly began. With one scarcely noticed milestone
after another, the planetary nervous system envisioned in the early 60's --
cyber rhetoric is as old as a Beatles tune -- unceremoniously began
insinuating itself into society. A strange amalgam of Defense Department
money, engineering expertise, and even a dab of countercultural idealism,
slowly brought on the Net we know today.
There was no big ribbon-cutting a month later when a third node was
installed at the University of California at Santa Barbara, or the following
month, when the reach extended outside California to the University of Utah.
No golden spike was hammered into the ground to commemorate the joining of
the coasts with a link to Cambridge, Mass., where a small consulting company
called Bolt Beranek & Newman had won the contract to build and run the
Arpanet.
What was emerging would be barely recognizable today. There were no @
signs, no dot coms, no World Wide Web, nothing called E-mail. The main
purpose was to let university-based researchers for the Defense Department
agency share computer resources, allowing someone in, say, California to run
a program on a machine in Massachusetts. Many system administrators were
reluctant. Computer power was scarce. Why should they share it with
strangers?
›››
data link, October 1999.
data link acknowledges the source of this article,
HPCwire,
the electronic news magazine for high-performance computing. Used with permission.
