Paul Baran

Simplified Characterization of Comms

Regular Communication Distributed Communication
hierarchy: call to local office <-> regional <-> national <-> regional and back nodes and switches
destroy local/regional/national office, comms cut off destroy node, still other paths

go / no go

Jeremey Reimer

IBM 2741, ca 1965

Already done old boy!

Don't be daft, man!

Meanwhile, back in the USA
UCLA- time sharing RAND - graphics SDC - time sharing
SRI- time shraing Stanford - AI Berkely - timesharing
Illinois - supercomputing CMD - AI BBN- time shraing
MIT - AI, graphics, timesharing Harvard - graphics

Real Photographs Of That Moment

IBM, CDC, AT&T:

"This won't work. This cannot be built."

There it is. The first router.

January 1970 - the first denial-of-service attack

1970 Network Control Protocol ; TCP/IC

1971 - the first email ; by 1973 3/4 of traffic on ARPAnet was email

ARPANET project oversight:

Bolt, Beranek and Newman: IMP hardware, software, operations

UCLA- analysis (how well is the network working?)

Network Analysis Corporation - topology (how well is the network connected?)

SRI - network information center

Network Working Group - host protocols

Elizabeth 'Jake' Feinler

Feinler eventually develops a 'handbook' (both physical, and digital database) that lists:

  • resources at every host
  • responsible technical administrators
  • 1000 pages, record of every node, insitution, and person who together made 'ARPANET'
  • goes on to create a directory, ever person on the arpanet and how to find them
  • registers all new hosts, all new documentation, all new how-tos

"Just as previous generations of human computers working together embodied the network to come, the early Internet's female information scientist embodied another function that would eventually be taken over by the system itself: search"

Claire L. Evanas, Broad Band, 2018: 204

"What the NIC did at first was, ostensibly, administrative: the secretarial afterthought of putting the ARPANET's newly available computing resources down on paper to please its funders, and then maintaining a record of its coordinates and contacts... here again were women elevating the mundane, identifying the missing human component of a complex technological undertaking."

Claire L. Evanas, Broad Band, 2018: 217

1969-1973 a great period of fermentation. These are fermentation machines. Ferment. Not my best illustration.

ARPANet Public Demo: First International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington 1972

  • lots of things being demo'd, including
  • air traffic simulation,
  • real time conferencing
  • computerized chess player
  • Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program

Supposedly, a picture from that conference

Reverse image search shows it is from the Arizona Department of Transportation

It's true. You can't believe everything you find online.

Who were the users of ARPAnet? Like, the actual humans, and what did they use it for?

"Had the ARPANET's only value been as a tool for resource sharing, the network might be remembered today as a minor failure rather than a spectacular success. But the network's users unexpectedly cam up with a new focus for network activity: electronic mail."

Janet Abbate: Inventing the Internet MIT Press 1999, 106.

But... this isn't the internet

And while October 29 is the birth of one network, an internet requires two or more networks

And that's what we'll explore next time.