. This is an account of the engineering and programming required to set up ARPANET, which, of course, is the Homo erectus of modern networking.
The truth is often a surprise. What, after all, could
be less cool, more fuddy-duddy, and even vaguely hemorrhoidal than Dwight D. Eisenhower and his pal Neil McElroy, the Sultan of Soap, who ran Procter & Gamble? Well, the next time you send a piece of e-mail, you might take a moment to realize that some of what they did was not so bad after all.
Eisenhower and McElroy, who served as Secretary of Defense, had a belief in science and technology. McElroy, in particular, thought that pure research, if left to its own devices, would be able to justify its existence. But it's not enough to believe. You also have to put beliefs into action, and to this end, Eisenhower and McElroy managed to set up ARPA. The critical thing was the atmosphere that was established in the agency right from the beginning. ARPA saw itself, as the authors point out, as a "group that would take on really advanced `far-out' research."
So, after setting up a place that had the right attitude, Eisenhower, and then John F. Kennedy, produced the rocket fuel that technological research
requires. They turned on the money faucet.The effect of this setup was obvious. For instance, in 1966, Bob Taylor wanted to do something about hooking different computers together. Taylor, a Texan, had made the jump from psychoacoustics to computing and was director of the Pentagon's Information Processing Techniques Office. He went to see the director of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld. In 20 minutes, Taylor walked away with the money, a million dollars to start studying the problem.
In fact, once the right people were involved and the money was there, the Internet seems inevitable. It may be true that all failed research projects are the same, but each successful one is successful in its own way, and this one's success involved a lot of people. The number and variety are staggering--theorists, engineers, administrators, programmers, engineers, graduate students, and the employees of Bolt Beranek and Newman, the Cambridge consulting firm that oversaw the installation of ARPANET's first computers.
J. C. R
. Licklider stands out. He was one of those gifted and endlessly curious men who had the knack of attacking what seemed to be widely different problems. If nothing else, he was a visionary when it came to the possibilities of computing. In the Pleistocene Epoch (aka 1960), Licklider, who wrote a paper called the "Man-Computer Symbiosis," foresaw a "massive network" in which "home computer consoles" (not then invented) would be linked.
The truth is, though, there were many others: Vint Cerf, a California computer scientist who came up with such notions as a routing computer to connect networks. Or Larry Roberts, who deserves a lot of the credit for ARPANET, and who, from the beginning, had an instinct for networking computers.
The writing of
Where Wizards Stay Up Late
could be better than it is. At best, it is comfortably readable; at worst, it has the aspect of too much research ground through a word processor. Its biggest flaw is that the authors never allow you any sense of the personal
ities of the people involved. Sometimes characters are given an identifying tick (one is coldhearted, another is friendly), but even the authors seem to forget such identification after a while.
Nevertheless, the book makes good reading for anyone interested in where the Internet came from, and how policy decisions, particularly where research is concerned, affect the outcome.
Craig Nova is the author of eight novels and the recipient of many awards and prizes, including an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. You can reach him on the Internet at
nova@sover.net
.
Book Review
