The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 63

Taylor, on the other hand, was jocular and gregarious, sometimes to a fault. “I’m an outgoing person,” he observed. Each year he would convene a conference of the ARPA-funded researchers and another for their best graduate students, usually in fun places like Park City, Utah, and New Orleans. He made each researcher give a presentation, and then everyone could pile on with questions and suggestions. In that way he got to know the rising stars around the country, making him a magnet for talent that would later serve him well when he went to work at Xerox PARC. It also helped him accomplish one of the most important tasks in building a network: getting everyone to buy into the idea.

ARPANET

Taylor knew that he needed to sell the time-sharing network idea to the people it was intended to help, namely the researchers who were getting ARPA funding. So he invited them to a meeting at the University of Michigan in April 1967, where he had Roberts present the plan. The computer sites would be connected, Roberts explained, by leased phone lines. He described two possible architectures: a hub system with a central computer in a place like Omaha that would route information, or a weblike system that looked like a highway map with lines crisscrossing as they were spun from place to place. Roberts and Taylor had begun to favor the decentralized approach; it would be safer. The information could be passed along from node to node until it reached its destination.

Many of the participants were reluctant to join the network. “The universities in general did not want to share their computers with anybody,” Roberts said. “They wanted to buy their own machines and hide in the corner.”49 Nor did they want the valuable processing time of their computers to be nibbled away by having to handle the traffic routing that would come with being on the network. The first to dissent were Marvin Minsky of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and his former colleague John McCarthy, who had moved to Stanford. Their computers, they said, were already being used to the max. Why would they want to allow others to tap into them? In addition they would have the burden of routing network traffic from computers they didn’t know and whose language they didn’t speak. “Both complained they would lose computing power and said they didn’t want to participate,” Taylor recalled. “I told them they had to, because it would let me cut my funding of computers by a factor of three.”50

Taylor was persuasive and Roberts persistent, and they pointed out to the participants that they were all being funded by ARPA. “We are going to build a network and you are going to participate in it,” Roberts declared flatly. “And you are going to connect it to your machines.”51 They would get no more funding to buy computers until they were hooked into the network.

Ideas are often sparked by the exchanges at meetings, and one popped up at the end of the Michigan session that helped to defuse opposition to the network. It came from Wes Clark, who had conceived a personal computer at Lincoln Laboratory dubbed the LINC. He was more interested in developing computers designed for individual use than he was in promoting time-sharing of large computers, so he hadn’t been paying much attention. But as the meeting was ending he realized why it was hard getting the research centers to accept the network idea. “Just before we broke up, I do remember suddenly realizing what the meta-problem was,” he said. “I passed Larry a note saying that I thought I saw how to solve the problem.”52 On the ride to the airport, in a rental car that Taylor was driving, Clark explained his idea to Roberts, along with two other colleagues. ARPA should not force the research computers at each site to handle the routing of data, Clark argued. Instead ARPA should design and give each site a standardized minicomputer that would do the routing. The big research computer at each site would then have only the simple task of establishing a connection with its ARPA-supplied routing minicomputer. This had three advantages: it would take most of the burden off the host site’s mainframe, give ARPA the power to standardize the network, and allow the routing of data to be completely distributed rather than controlled by a few big hubs.

Taylor embraced the idea right away. Roberts asked a few questions and then agreed. The network would be managed by the standardized minicomputers that Clark had suggested, which became known as Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. Later they would simply be called “routers.”

When they got to the airport, Taylor asked who should build these IMPs. Clark said it was obvious: the task should be assigned to Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Cambridge firm where Licklider had worked. But also in the car was Al Blue, who was in charge of compliance issues at ARPA. He reminded the group that the project would have to be sent out for bids in accordance with federal contracting standards.53

At a follow-up conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in October 1967, Roberts presented the revised plan for the network. He also gave it a name, ARPA Net, which later morphed into ARPANET. But one issue remained unresolved: Would communication between two places on the network require a dedicated line between them, as a phone call did? Or was there some practical way to allow multiple data streams to share lines simultaneously, sort of like a time-sharing system for phone lines? Potential specifications for such a data network had been proposed earlier that month by a committee at the Pentagon.

That is when a young engineer from England, Roger Scantlebury, got up to present a paper describing the research of his boss, Donald Davies of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory. It provided an answer: a method of breaking messages into small units that Davies had dubbed “packets.” Scantlebury added that the idea had been developed independently by a researcher named Paul Baran at RAND. After the talk, Larry Roberts and others gathered around Scantlebury to learn more, then moved on to the bar to discuss it late into the night.

PACKET SWITCHING: PAUL BARAN, DONALD DAVIES, AND LEONARD KLEINROCK

There are many ways of sending data through a network. The simplest, known as circuit switching, is the way a phone system does it: a set of switches creates a dedicated circuit for signals to go back and forth for the duration of the conversation, and the connection remains open, even during long pauses. Another method is message switching or, as the telegraph operators called it, store-and-forward switching. In this system, an entire message is given an address header, sent into the network, and then passed along from node to node as it wends its way to its destination.

An even more efficient method is packet switching, a special type of store-and-forward switching in which the messages are broken into bite-size units of the exact same size, called packets, which are given address headers describing where they should go. These packets are then sent hopping through the network to their destination by being passed along from node to node, using whatever links are most available at that instant. If certain links start getting clogged with too much data, some of the packets will be routed to alternative paths. When all the packets get to their destination node, they are reassembled based on the instructions in the headers. “It’s like breaking a long letter into dozens of postcards, each numbered and addressed to the same place,” explained Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s pioneers. “Each may take different routes to get to the destination, and then they’re reassembled.”54

As Scantlebury explained in Gatlinburg, the person who first fully conceived a packet-switched network was an engineer named Paul Baran (pronounced BEAR-en). His family had immigrated from Poland when he was two and settled in Philadelphia, where his father opened a small grocery store. After graduating from Drexel in 1949, Baran joined Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in their new computer company, where he tested components for UNIVAC. He moved to Los Angeles, took night classes at UCLA, and eventually got a job at the RAND Corporation.