NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] [Les Earnest] Re: Paul Baran's passing
----- Forwarded message from Les Earnest <les@cs.stanford.edu> -----
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:07:29 -0700
From: Les Earnest <les@cs.stanford.edu>
Subject: Paul Baran's passing
I am saddened to learn of Paul Baran's passing (3/28/11 page B4) since he
has been a long time helpful friend. However I am also dismayed by false
claims in the New York Times article that Paul played a central role in the
creation of ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet. I never heard him make
such a claim but see that others are now trying to rewrite history for some
reason.
Working at Rand Corporation, Paul did important theoretical work in the
early 1960s on how to build survivable military communication networks and
tried to make it happen but was unable to get funding from the Defense
Department. He initiated a number of later innovations including Ricochet,
the first public wireless mesh networking system, in 1985.
It appears to me that one source of confusion about networking history is
that nearly all writings on this topic skip over the first computer
network, which was part of the SAGE air defense system. SAGE was initiated
in the early 1950s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and
also gave the first practical demonstration of interactive computing,
accomplished by timesharing, which was an essential precursor to ARPAnet.
Thus ARPAnet was a direct descendant of SAGE and was mostly developed by
people who came from MIT Lincoln Lab. I note that the Internet is still
mainly composed of timesharing systems, now called "servers," connected to
various kinds of terminals, many of which are now so small that they fit in
your pocket.
SAGE used special purpose packetized networks to gather radar data from a
hundred and some radar sites across North America and to process it at 23
large computer centers. SAGE also used land line data links to communicate
between adjacent sectors and with higher level commands.It used packet
radio systems to issue guidance commands to manned interceptors and
ground-to-air missiles in order to intercept incoming bombers. The only
problem with this technological marvel was that in an actual attack, which
thankfully never happened, SAGE would have immediately malfunctioned at
several levels. Nevertheless it was kept going for 25 years at a cost to
taxpayers of billions of dollars and to the immense profit of the
military-industrial-political complex. But that is another ongoing story.
J.C.R. Licklider ("Lick" to his friends) helped design the human-computer
interface for SAGE and subsequently wrote a seminal paper on that topic
[1]. He also provided financial support for the development of general
purpose timesharing systems, both while managing projects at Bolt, Beranek,
and Newman (BBN) and when he later initiated a computer research program at
ARPA. The first person to advocate general purpose timesharing was MIT
Prof. John McCarthy [2] and Lick hired him as a consultant at BBN, then
sponsored the development of a demonstration timesharing system there.
After moving to the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) in 1962 Lick funded development of a number of general purpose
timesharing systems at various universities and subsequently called for the
development of computer networks that would interconnect such systems,
which resulted in the ARPAnet, though he did not specify exactly how this
should be done.
How do I know all this? I was there. I had known Lick since 1949 and
reconnected when I came to Lincoln Lab in 1956 to help design SAGE. I
later developed an experimental cursive handwriting recognizer using the
Lab's TX-2 computer, which I shared on evenings and weekends beginning in
1960 with other graduate students including Ivan Sutherland, then working
on his Sketchpad drawing system, Larry Roberts working on perception of 3D
objects from photographs, and Len Kleinrock, doing simulations of partly
connected computer networks. After later being sent to the Headquarters of
Central Intelligence Agency for a year and two years at the Pentagon
assisting the Joint Chiefs of Staff I escaped to Stanford University and
helped John McCarthy set up the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab
(SAIL). During 1967-68 I was the Stanford representative on the start-up
committee for ARPAnet, which included about a dozen people.
The principal architect of ARPAnet was Larry Roberts, who had been
recruited to ARPA from Lincoln Lab. He based his approach to packet
switching on the analysis in Len Kleinrock's dissertation [3]. Our goals
had nothing to do with military communications or the survivability
thereof. Our aim was to facilitate cooperative research by interconnecting
academic timesharing systems. We didn't hear about the similar ideas being
proposed by Paul Baran and by Donald Davies in Britain until the end of
1967 and by then our architectural specifications were pretty well set. In
any case, neither Baran nor Davies were able to get funding then, so there
were no competing development projects.
Following our review of technical proposals for ARPAnet in November 1968,
BBN was chosen as the contractor and those working on the project came
mainly from Lincoln Lab. Our committee had foolishly rejected the idea of
providing email service, which turned out to be the first "killer app," but
the performance specifications that we chose happily turned out to be able
to support both email and the much later web services. We were ultimately
both surprised and delighted by the enormous growth and usefulness of the
net.
Les Earnest
Senior Research Scientist Emeritus
Stanford University
REFERENCES
[1] J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," IRE Transactions on Human
Factors in Electronics, March 1960.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
[2] John McCarthy, "Memorandum to P.J. Morse Proposing Time Sharing", MIT
Memo, Jan. 1, 1959.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing-memo/timesharing-memo.html
[3] Leonard Kleinrock, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets," PhD
dissertation, MIT, 1963.
----- End forwarded message -----