Net Result
Were it not
for a coin tossed in the fall of 1962, the Internet might not exist. The winner
of the toss, MIT computer scientist Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (or "Lick,"
as he insisted on being called), got the top job at an obscure government
agency known as the Command and Control Research Division, a division of the
Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was created after
Sputnik to close the purported gap between Soviet and American science.
When Licklider arrived, his
agency specialized in the sort of esoteric Department of Defense research that
could only be called "asinine" (his word, in fact). Air Force intelligence, for
instance, wanted to use the agency's huge mainframe computers to detect
patterns of behavior among high-level Soviet officials. The idea was to feed
the computers bits of information like, "The Soviet Air Force chief drank two
martinis yesterday," or, "Kruschev isn't reading Pravda on Mondays,"
from which the computer was to deduce that the Soviets were building a new
missile, or that some inner-circle coup was imminent, or whatever.
This is a test
of Word's abilities.
Licklider
got rid of the fanciful war games, substituting something that must have
sounded equally bizarre--the creation of an "Intergalactic Network." In two
short years on the job (he returned to MIT in 1964), Licklider poured enough
money into America's universities to influence an entire generation of computer
scientists, of whom some would go on to invent video games, the mouse, the
metaphor of "windows" and "icons" and, of course, the Internet itself.
Licklider's prescience stemmed from his pioneering research on
"time-sharing"--the then-unthinkable notion that more than one person could
share a computer at the same time, through terminals. "Time-sharing" had the
added benefit of letting people get their hands on keyboards, which few of them
had ever done. Computer science up to that point had been dominated by
"batch-processing," a system believed to be maximally efficient, wherein
programmers wrote code at their desks, copied it onto stacks of cards with
holes punched into them, and handed them over to technicians who had a
priestlike say over who got to use the computer, and when.
Considering his achievements, J.C.R. Licklider may be the
most influential little-known person in the history of computer science. Katie
Hafner and Matthew Lyon, authors of Where Wizards Stay
Up Late: The
Origins of the Internet , dedicate their book to him, although that,
unfortunately, is the grandest of their corrective gestures. The short 15 pages
they devote to his life do little more than summarize his résumé.
This reflects a larger flaw
in the book. Hafner, a contributing editor at Newsweek and co-author
with John Markoff of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer
Frontier , and Lyon, her husband and an assistant to the president of the
University of Texas, have written an epic technological history. Their story of
how the Internet was discovered is a blow-by-blow saga of how a single
engineering problem, in this case the construction of the ARPANET (precursor to
the Internet), was solved. But the larger intellectual revolution undergirding
the Internet--the redefinition of the relationship between people and
computers, which turned impersonal calculating machines into intimate tools for
everyday thought--earns only a few mentions in passing. There is merit to
Hafner and Lyon's narrowly focused approach. They've conducted extensive
interviews with the scientists involved, culled material from archives and
private collections, and revised the historical record where necessary.
For
instance, they debunk the long-standing myth that the Internet was created as a
test to see if computer networks could be designed to survive a nuclear war.
Instead, as Lyon and Hafner show, the Net was built because the federal
government needed a way for all the incompatible computers being used for
government research to communicate with each other. In a sense, the Internet
was the ultimate time-sharing project: a nationwide network capable of
connecting any sort of computer with another computer.
The logistics were daunting. How on earth were
scientists to create connections between dozens, let alone hundreds, of
computers without running up a fortune in telephone bills? The answer, which
occupies three chapters of the book, is "packet switching," and it remains the
core of today's Internet. Instead of opening a direct connection with the
destination computer, messages are sent willy-nilly, chopped up into little
packets that are reassembled when they get to their destination.
Hafner
and Lyon tell the story of how two scientists, Paul Baran in America and Donald
Davies in England, arrived independently at the notion of packet switching.
They trace the web of conversations that brought their ideas to the office of
Bob Taylor, Licklider's successor. Taylor didn't have time to manage the
details of the ARPANET project, and hired one particularly brilliant graduate
student named Larry Roberts to do it for him. Roberts assembled his fellow
graduate students from universities around the country, then gave them the
right to do more or less whatever they wanted. Perhaps the greatest mystery in
the history of the Internet is one about which Hafner and Lyon never bother to
speculate--how and why the Pentagon, at the height of the backlash against the
Vietnam War, was persuaded to grant a bunch of longhaired, Tolkien-reading grad
students huge sums of money, without insisting on oversight. Whatever the
reason, it worked: The crucial design decisions were made at a series of
informal grad-student conferences, and by September 1969, a working connection
had been opened between a computer at UCLA and one at Stanford.
The second half of Where Wizards Stay Up Late
describes the aftermath of the ARPANET project. We read about how the students
developed interactive games, created the first online discussion groups, fought
over what technical standards to adopt, and ran headfirst into issues still
relevant today--privacy online, the appropriate use of computers, ownership of
software, how to govern the Internet. Once again, though, the authors don't
interpret the picture they're painting in such studious detail. The Internet,
barely in the government's hands in the first place, was hijacked by the
students, who seemed to be more interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons than
in using the network solely for research.
How does the architecture of
the Internet reflect the strange counterculture these students conjured up out
of Pentagon funds? Readers who want a more complete picture should read two
other books: Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
(1984), which gives a still-fresh account of MIT's Project MAC (not
coincidentally funded by Licklider), an enterprise dominated by the "hacker
ethic"--the compulsive urge to explore and improve on things. (In that sense,
the Internet was the ultimate hack.) And Stewart Brand's II Cybernetic
Frontiers (1974), which recounts how this generation of "computer kids"
designed computer games based on science fiction and used the Internet to
fashion a universe of their own. Building the Internet was not simply about
building a better mousetrap; it was, for its creators, also about building a
better and smarter, and wildly utopian, world. That story remains to be
told.
