Roots of The Internet-A Personal History

Roots of the Internet: A Personal History
Author(s): Leo Beranek

Source: Massachusetts Historical Review , 2000, Vol. 2 (2000), pp. 55-75
Published by: Massachusetts Historical Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25081152
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Roots of the Internet
A Personal History
LEO BERANEK
On October 3, 1969, two computers at remote locat

to each other over the Internet for the first time. Conne
miles of leased telephone line, the two machines, one
versity of California in Los Angeles and the other at Stan
Institute in Palo Alto, attempted to transmit the simplest o
word "login," sent one letter at a time. Charlie Kline, an und
UCLA, announced to another student at Stanford by telepho
to type an L." He keyed in the letter and then asked, "Did you
the other end, the researcher responded, "I got one-one-fou
computer, is the letter L. Next, Kline sent an "O" over the lin
transmitted the "G" Stanford's computer crashed. A program
paired after several hours, had caused the problem. Despite
computers had actually managed to convey a meaningful me
not the one planned. In its own phonetic fashion, the UCLA
"ello" (L-O) to its compatriot in Stanford. The first, albeit t
network had been born.1
The Internet is one of the defining inventions of the twentieth
bing shoulders with such developments as aircraft, atomic en
ploration, and television. Unlike those breakthroughs, howev
have its oracles in the nineteenth century; in fact, as late as
modern Jules Verne could have imagined how a collaboration
entists and psychologists would begin a communication revol
ribbon laboratories of AT&T, IBM, and Control Data, when p
Leo Beranek holds a doctorate in science from Harvard University. Besi
reer at both Harvard and MIT, he has founded several businesses in the U
and has been a leader in Boston community affairs.

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THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL REVIEW
the outlines of the Internet, could not grasp its potential or

puter communication except as a single telephone line usin
switching methods, a nineteenth-century innovation. Inste
had to come from outside the businesses that had led the co
munication revolution?from new companies and institution
portantly, the brilliant people working at them.2
The Internet has a long and complicated history, peppered
insights in both communications and artificial intelligence.
memoir and part history, traces its roots from their origin
voice-communication laboratories to the creation of the fir
type, known as ARPANET?the network through which
Stanford in 1969. Its name derived from its sponsor, the A
Projects Agency (ARPA) in the U.S. Department of Defense.
Newman (BBN), the firm that I helped create in the la
ARPANET and served for twenty years as its manager?a
me with the opportunity to relate the network's story. Alon
to identify the conceptual leaps of a number of gifted indi
their hard work and production skills, without which you
surfing would not be possible. Key among these innov
machine symbiosis, computer time-sharing, and the pac
work, of which ARPANET was the world's first incarnation
of these inventions will come to life, I hope, along with som
cal meaning, in the course of what follows.
Prelude to ARPANET
During World War II, I served as director at Harvard's Elec

oratory, which collaborated with the Psycho-Acoustic Labor
close cooperation between a group of physicists and a group
was, apparently, unique in history. One outstanding young
made a particular impression on me: J. C. R. Licklider, who
unusual proficiency in both physics and psychology. I woul
keeping his talents close by in the ensuing decades, and they
prove vital to ARPANET'S creation.
At the close of the war I migrated to MIT and became asso
Communication Engineering and Technical Director of its
tory. In 1949,1 convinced MIT's Department of Electrical E
point Licklider as a tenured associate professor to work with
munication problems. Shortly after his arrival, the chair of
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asked Licklider to serve on a committee that established Lincoln Laboratory,

an MIT research powerhouse supported by the Department of Defense. The
opportunity introduced Licklider to the nascent world of digital computing?
an introduction that brought the world one step closer to the Internet.3
In 1948,1 ventured out?with MIT's blessing?to form the acoustical con
sulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman with my MIT colleagues Richard Bolt
and Robert Newman. The firm incorporated in 19 5 3, and as its first president
I had the opportunity to guide its growth for the next sixteen years. By 1953,
BBN had attracted top-flight post-doctorates and obtained research support
from government agencies. With such resources right at hand, we began to ex
pand into new areas of research, including psychoacoustics in general and, in
particular, speech compression?that is, the means for shortening the length
of a speech segment during transmission; criteria for prediction of speech in
telligibility in noise; the effects of noise on sleep; and last but certainly not
least, the still-nascent field of artificial intelligence, or machines that seem to
think. Because of the prohibitive cost of digital computers, we made do with
analog ones. This meant, however, that a problem that could be computed on
today's PC in a few minutes then might take a full day or even a week.
In the mid 1950s, when BBN decided to pursue research about how ma
chines could efficiently amplify human labor, I decided we needed an out
standing experimental psychologist to head up the activity, preferably one
acquainted with the then rudimentary field of digital computers. Licklider,
naturally, became my top candidate. My appointment book shows that I
courted him with numerous lunches in the spring of 1956 and one critical
meeting in Los Angeles that summer. A position at BBN meant that Licklider
would give up a tenured faculty position, so to convince him to join the firm
we offered stock options?a common benefit in the Internet industry today.
In the spring of 1957, Licklider came aboard BBN as a vice president.4
Lick, as he insisted that we call him, stood about six feet tall, appeared thin
boned, almost fragile, with thinning brown hair offset by enthusiastic blue
eyes. Outgoing and always on the verge of a smile, he ended almost every sec
ond sentence with a slight chuckle, as though he had just made a humorous
statement. He walked with a brisk but gentle step, and he always found the
time to listen to new ideas. Relaxed and self-deprecating, Lick merged easily
with the talent already at BBN. He and I worked together especially well: I
cannot remember a time when we disagreed.
Licklider had been on staff only a few months when he told me that he
wanted BBN to buy a digital computer for his group. When I pointed out that
we already had a punched-card computer in the financial department and
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analog computers in the experimental psychology group, he replie

did not interest him. He wanted a then state-of-the-art machine p
the Royal-McBee Company, a subsidiary of Royal Typewriter. "W
cost?" I asked. "Around $30,000," he replied, rather blandly, and
this price tag was a discount he had already negotiated. BBN had
claimed, spent anything approaching that amount of money on
search apparatus. "What are you going to do with it?" I queri
know," Lick responded, "but if BBN is going to be an important c
the future, it must be in computers." Although I hesitated at fi
for computer with no apparent use seemed just too reckless?I h
deal of faith in Lick's convictions and finally agreed that BBN sho
funds. I presented his request to the other senior staff, and wit
proval, Lick brought BBN into the digital era.5
The Royal-McBee turned out to be our entr?e into a much larg
Within a year of the computer's arrival, Kenneth Olsen, the presi
fledgling Digital Equipment Corporation, stopped by BBN, ostensi
see our new computer. After chatting with us and satisfying himself
really understood digital computation, he asked if we would con
ject. He explained that Digital had just completed construction of
of their first computer, the PDP-i, and that they needed a test site f
We agreed to try it.
/. C. R. Licklider, psycho-physicist,
often called the promoter of the
Internet, who advocated through
published papers the need for time
shared computers and transmission
lines.
Photograph from Leo Beranek's

personal files, courtesy of Paul
Koby, Cambridge.
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The prototype PDP-i arrived shortly after our discussions. A behemoth

compared to the Royal-McBee, it would fit no place in our offices except the
visitors' lobby, where we surrounded it with Japanese screens. Lick and Ed
Fredkin, a youthful and eccentric genius, and several others put it through its
paces for most of the month, after which Lick provided Olsen with a list of
suggested improvements, especially how to make it more user-friendly. The
computer had won us all over, so BBN arranged for Digital to provide us with
their first production PDP-i on a standard lease basis. Then Lick and I took
off for Washington to seek research contracts that would make use of this
machine, which carried a i960 price tag of $150,000. Our visits to the De
partment of Education, National Institutes of Health, National Science
Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Defense proved Lick's convic
tions correct, and we secured several important contracts.6
Between i960 and 1962, with BBN's new PDP-i in-house and several
more on order, Lick turned his attention to some of the fundamental concep
tual problems that stood between an era of isolated computers that worked
as giant calculators and the future of communications networks. The first
two, deeply interrelated, were man-machine symbiosis and computer time
sharing. Lick's thinking had a definitive impact on both.
He became a crusader for man-machine symbiosis as early as i960, when
he wrote a trailblazing paper that established his critical role in the making of
the Internet. In that piece, he investigated the implications of the concept at
length. He defined it essentially as "an interactive partnership of man and ma
chine" in which
Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria,
and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routiniz
able work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and deci
sions in technical and scientific thinking.
He also identified "prerequisites for . . . effective, cooperative association,"

including the key concept of computer time-sharing, which imagined the si
multaneous use of a machine by many persons, allowing, for example, em
ployees in a large company, each with a screen and keyboard, to use the same
mammoth central computer for word processing, number crunching, and
information retrieval. As Licklider envisioned the synthesis of man-machine
symbiosis and computer time-sharing, it could make it possible for computer
users, via telephone lines, to tap into mammoth computing machines at vari
ous centers located nationwide.7
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Of course, Lick alone did not develop the means for making
work. At BBN, he tackled the problem with John McCarthy, M
and Ed Fredkin. Lick brought McCarthy and Minsky, both ar
gence experts at MIT, to BBN to work as consultants in the sum
I had met neither of them before they started. Consequently, w
strange men sitting at a table in the guest conference roo
approached them and asked, "Who are you?" McCarthy, n
answered, "Who are you?" The two worked well with Fre
McCarthy credited with insisting that "time sharing could be d
computer, namely a PDP-i." McCarthy also admired his indom
do attitude. "I kept arguing with him," McCarthy recalled in
that an interrupt system was needed. And he said, 'We can do
needed was some kind of swapper. 'We can do that.'"8 (An "inte
a message into packets; a "swapper" interleaves message pa
transmission and reassembles them separately on arrival.)
The team quickly produced results, creating a modified PDP
screen divided into four parts, each assigned to a separate user
1962, BBN conducted the first public demonstration of time-
one operator in Washington, D.C., and two in Cambridge. Con
tions followed soon after. That winter, for example, BBN ins
shared information system in the Massachusetts General
allowed nurses and doctors to create and access patient records
tions, all connected to a central computer. BBN also formed a s
pany, TELCOMP, that allowed subscribers in Boston and New
our time-shared digital computers by using teletypewriters con
machines via dial-up telephone lines.
The time-sharing breakthrough also spurred BBN's internal
purchased ever-more advanced computers from Digital, IBM,
we invested in separate large-disk memories so specialized we
them in a spacious, raised-floor, air-conditioned room. The f
more prime contracts from federal agencies than any other co
England. By 1968, BBN had hired over 600 employees, more th
computer division. Those included many names now famous i
Jerome Elkind, David Green, Tom Marill, John Swets, Frank
Crowther, Warren Teitelman, Ross Quinlan, Fisher Black, D
Bernie Cosell, Hawley Rising, Severo Ornstein, John H
Feurzeig, Paul Castleman, Seymour Papert, Robert Kahn, D
Fredkin, Sheldon Boilen, and Alex McKenzie. BBN soon bec
Cambridge's "Third University"?and to some academics th
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teaching and committee assignments made BBN more appealing than the
other two.
This infusion of eager and brilliant computer nicks?1960s lingo for
geeks?changed the social character of BBN, adding to the spirit of freedom
and experimentation the firm encouraged. BBN's original acousticians ex
uded traditionalism, always wearing jackets and ties. Programmers, as re
mains the case today, came to work in chinos, T-shirts, and sandals. Dogs
roamed the offices, work went on around the clock, and coke, pizza, and
potato chips constituted dietary staples. The women, hired only as technical
assistants and secretaries in those antediluvian days, wore slacks and often
went without shoes. Blazing a trail still underpopulated today, BBN set up a
day nursery to accommodate the staff's needs. Our bankers?upon whom we
depended for capital?unfortunately remained inflexible and conservative, so
we had to keep them from seeing this strange (to them) menagerie.
Creating ARPANET
In October 1962, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an office

within the U.S. Department of Defense, lured Licklider away from BBN for a
one-year stint, which stretched into two. Jack Ruina, ARPA's first director,
convinced Licklider that he could best spread his time-sharing theories
around the country through the government's Information Processing Tech
niques Office (IPTO), where Lick became Director of Behavioral Sciences.
Because ARPA had purchased mammoth computers for a score of university
and government laboratories during the 1950s, it already had resources
spread across the country that Lick could exploit. Intent on demonstrating
that these machines could do more than numerical calculation, he promoted
their use for interactive computing. By the time Lick finished his two years,
ARPA had spread the development of time-sharing nationwide through con
tract awards. Because Lick's stockholdings posed a possible conflict of inter
est, BBN had to let this research gravy-train pass it by.9
After Lick's term the directorship eventually passed to Robert Taylor, who
served from 1966 to 1968 and oversaw the agency's initial plan to build a net
work that allowed computers at ARPA-affiliated research centers across the
country to share information. According to the stated purpose of ARPA's
goals, the hypothesized network should allow small research laboratories to
access large-scale computers at large research centers and thus relieve ARPA
from supplying every laboratory with its own multimillion dollar machine.10
Prime reponsibility for managing the network project within ARPA went to
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Lawrence Roberts from Lincoln Laboratory, whom Taylor recru

as IPTO Program Manager. Roberts had to devise the basic goals
ing blocks of the system and then find an appropriate firm to bu
contract.
In order to lay the groundwork for the project, Roberts prop
cussion among the leading thinkers on network developme
the tremendous potential such a meeting of the minds seem
Roberts met with little enthusiasm from the men he contacted.
their computers were busy full time and that they could think of no
would want to do cooperatively with other computer sites.11 Ro
ceeded undaunted, and he did eventually pull ideas from some r
primarily Wes Clark, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Leonard Kle
Bob Kahn.
Wes Clark, at Washington University in St. Louis, contributed a critical
idea to Roberts's plans: Clark proposed a network of identical, intercon
nected mini-computers, which he called "nodes." The large computers at var
ious participating locations, rather than hooking directly into a network,
would each hook into a node; the set of nodes would then manage the actual
routing of data along the network lines. Through this structure, the difficult
job of traffic management would not further burden the host computers,
which had to otherwise receive and process information. In a memorandum
outlining Clark's suggestion, Roberts renamed the nodes "Interface Message
Lawrence Roberts (left), of ARPA, 1970s. Courtesy of Lawrence Roberts.

Paul Baran (right), of the RAND Corporation. Courtesy of Paul Baran.
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Processors" (IMPs). Clark's plan exactly prefigured the Host-IMP relation

ship that would make ARPANET work.12
Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation, unwittingly supplied Roberts with
key ideas about how the transmission could work and what the IMPs would
do. In i960, when Baran had tackled the problem of how to protect vulnera
ble telephone communication systems in case of a nuclear attack, he had
imagined a way to break one message down into several "message blocks,"
route the separate pieces over different routes (telephone lines), and then re
assemble the whole at its destination. In 1967, Roberts discovered this trea
sure in the U.S. Air Force files, where Baran's eleven volumes of explanation,
compiled between i960 and 1965, languished untested and unused.13
Donald Davies, at the National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain, was
working out a similar network design in the early 1960s. His version, for
mally proposed in 1965, coined the "packet switching" terminology that
ARPANET would ultimately adopt. Davies suggested splitting typewritten
messages into data "packets" of a standard size and time-sharing them on a
single line?thus, the process of packet switching. Although he proved the el
ementary feasibility of his proposal with an experiment in his laboratory,
nothing further came of his work until Roberts drew on it.14
Leonard Kleinrock, now at the University of Los Angeles, finished his the
sis in 1959, and in 19 61 he wrote an MIT report that analyzed data flow in
networks. (He later expanded this study in his 1976 book Queuing Systems,
which showed in theory that packets could be queued without loss.) Roberts
used Kleinrock's analysis to bolster his confidence on the feasibility of a
packet-switched network,15 and Kleinrock convinced Roberts to incorporate
measurement software that would monitor the network's performance. After
the ARPANET was installed, he and his students handled the monitoring.16
Pulling together all of these insights, Roberts decided that ARPA should
pursue "a packet switching network." Bob Kahn, at BBN, and Leonard
Kleinrock, at UCLA, convinced him of the need for a test using a full-scale
network on long-distance telephone lines rather than just a laboratory exper
iment. As daunting as that test would be, Roberts had obstacles to overcome
even to reach that point. The theory presented a high likelihood of failure,
largely because so much about the overall design remained uncertain. Older
Bell Telephone engineers declared the idea entirely unworkable. "Communi
cations professionals," Roberts wrote, "reacted with considerable anger and
hostility, usually saying I did not know what I was talking about."17 Some of
the big companies maintained that the packets would circulate forever, mak
ing the whole effort a waste of time and money. Besides, they argued, why
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would anyone want such a network when Americans alre

world's best telephone system? The communications industr
come his plan with open arms.
Nonetheless, Roberts released ARPA's "request for propos
mer of 1968. It called for a trial network made up of four I
four host computers; if the four-node network proved its
would expand to include fifteen more hosts. When the r
BBN, Frank Heart took on the job of administering BBN's b
ically built, stood just under six feet tall and sported a hig
looked like a black brush. When excited, he spoke in a loud
voice. In 1951, his senior year at MIT, he had signed up for
first course in computer engineering, from which he caught th
He worked at Lincoln Laboratory for fifteen years before co
team at Lincoln, all later at BBN, included Will Crowther, S
Dave Waiden, and Hawley Rising. They had become exper
electrical measuring devices to telephone lines to gather info
coming pioneers in computing systems that worked in "rea
to recording data and analyzing it later.18
Heart approached each new project with great caution and
cept an assignment unless confident that he could meet sp
deadlines. Naturally, he approached the ARPANET bid with
given the proposed system's riskiness and a schedule that di
cient time for planning. Nonetheless, he did take it on, pers
leagues, myself included, who believed that the company sh
into the unknown.
Heart started by pulling together a small team of those BB
with the most knowledge about computers and programmin
Hawley Rising, a quiet electrical engineer; Severo Ornstein,
who had worked at Lincoln Laboratory with Wes Clark; Be
grammer with an uncanny ability to find bugs in complex
Robert Kahn, an applied mathematician with a strong intere
of networking; Dave Waiden, who had worked on real-tim
Heart at Lincoln Laboratory; and Will Crowther, also a
league and admired for his ability to write compact code.
weeks to complete the proposal, no-one in this crew could
night's sleep. The ARPANET group worked until nearly daw
researching every detail of how to make this system work.19
The final proposal filled two hundred pages and cost mor
to prepare, the most the company had ever spent on such a
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covered every conceivable aspect of the system, beginning with the computer
that would serve as the IMP at each host location. Heart had influenced this
choice with his adamance that the machine must be reliable above all else. He
favored Honeywell's new DDP-516?it had the correct digital capacity and
could handle input and output signals with speed and efficiency. (Honeywell's
manufacturing plant only stood a short drive from BBN's offices.) The pro
posal also spelled out how the network would address and queue the packets;
determine the best available transmission routes to avoid congestion; recover
from line, power, and IMP failures; and monitor and debug the machines from
a remote-control center. During the research BBN also determined that the
network could process the packets much more quickly than ARPA had ex
pected?in only about one-tenth the time originally specified. Even so, the doc
ument cautioned ARPA that "it will be difficult to make the system work."20
Although 140 companies received Roberts's request and 13 submitted pro
posals, BBN was one of only two that made the government's final list. All the
Frank Heart explaining the first Interface Message Processor (IMP)

to BBN Vice President Samuel Labate. (1969)
Courtesy of Frank Heart.
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hard work paid off. On December 23,1968, a telegram arrived fro

Ted Kennedy's office congratulating BBN "on winning the contrac
terfaith [sic] message processor." Related contracts for the initial
went to UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of
at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The government re
group of four, partly because East Coast universities lacked enth
ARPA's invitation to join in the early trials and partly because the gov
wanted to avoid the high costs of cross-country leased lines in the
iments. Ironically, these factors meant that BBN was fifth on th
work.21
As much work as BBN had invested in the bid, it proved infinitesimal com
pared to the work that came next: designing and building a revolutionary
communications network. Although BBN had to create only a four-host
demonstration network to start with, the eight-month deadline imposed by
the government contract forced the staff into weeks of marathon late-night
sessions. Since BBN was not responsible for providing or configuring the host
computers at each host site, the bulk of its work would revolve around the
IMPs?the idea developed from Wes Clark's "nodes"?that had to connect
the computer at each host site to the system. Between New Year's Day and
September 1,1969, BBN had to design the overall system and determine the
network's hardware and software needs; acquire and modify the hardware;
develop and document procedures for the host sites; ship the first IMP to
UCLA, and one a month thereafter to the Stanford Research Institute, UC
Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah; and, finally, oversee the arrival, in
stallation, and operation of each machine. To build the system, the BBN staff
broke into two teams, one for the hardware?generally referred to as the IMP
team?and the other for software.
The hardware team had to begin by designing the basic IMP, which they
created by modifying Honeywell's DDP-516, the machine Heart had selected.
This machine was truly elementary and posed a real challenge to the IMP
team. It had neither a hard drive nor a floppy drive and possessed only 12,000
bytes of memory, a far cry from the 100,000,000,000 bytes available in mod
ern desktop computers. The machine's operating system?the rudimentary
version of the Windows OS on most of our PCs?existed on punched paper
tapes about a half inch wide. As the tape moved across a light bulb in the
machine, light passed through the punched holes and actuated a row of pho
tocells that the computer used to "read" the data on the tape. A portion of
software information might take yards of tape. To allow this computer to
"communicate," Severo Ornstein designed electronic attachments that
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W$
:?ii^%
m i
m
Interface Message Processor (IMP) with rear door open

Beneath the covers for the six inner units are thousands of
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would transfer electrical signals in it and would receive signals f

unlike the signals the brain sends out as speech and takes in as h
Willy Crowther headed the software team. He possessed the abi
the whole software skein in mind, as one colleague said, "like d
whole city while keeping track of the wiring to each lamp and t
to every toilet."23 Dave Waiden concentrated on the programmin
dealt with communication between an IMP and its host computer
Cosell worked on process and debugging tools. The three spent
developing the routing system that would relay each packet from
another until it reached its destination. The need for developin
paths for the packets?that is, packet switching?in case of path
or breakdown proved especially challenging. Crowther respo
problem with a dynamic routing procedure, a masterpiece of pr
that earned the highest respect and praise from his colleagues.
In a process so complex that invited it occasional error, Hear
that we make the network reliable. He insisted on frequent oral rev
staff's work. Bernie Cosell recalled, "It was like your worst nigh
oral exam by someone with psychic abilities. He could intuit the
design you were least sure of, the places you understood least w
where you were just song-and-dancing, trying to get by, and ca
fortable spotlight on parts you least wanted to work on."24
In order to insure that all of this would work once staff and mac
operating at locations hundreds if not thousands of miles apart,
to develop procedures for connecting host computers to the IMP
since the computers at the host sites all had different character
gave the responsibility for preparing the document to Bob K
BBN's best writers and an expert on the flow of information throug
all network. In two months, Kahn completed the procedures, w
known as BBN Report 1822. Kleinrock later remarked that any
was involved in the ARPANET will never forget that report num
it was the defining spec for how the things would mate."25
Despite the detailed specifications that the IMP team had sent
about how to modify the DDP-516, the prototype that arrived a
work. Ben Barker took on the job of debugging the machine, w
rewiring the hundreds of "pins" nestled in four vertical drawer
of the cabinet (see photo). To move the wires that were tigh
around these delicate pins, each roughly one-tenth of an inch fr
bors, Barker had to use a heavy "wire-wrap gun" that constantl
to snap the pins, in which case we would have to replace an enti
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During the months that this work took, BBN meticulously tracked all the
changes and passed the information on to the Honeywell engineers, who
could then ensure that the next machine they sent would function properly.
We hoped to check it over quickly?our Labor Day deadline was looming
large?before shipping it to UCLA, the first host in line for IMP installation.
But we were not so lucky: the machine arrived with many of the same prob
lems, and again Barker had to go in with his wire-wrap gun.
Finally, with wires all properly wrapped and only a week or so to go before
we had to ship our official IMP No. i to California, we ran into one last prob
lem. The machine now worked correctly, but it still crashed, sometimes as
often as once a day. Barker suspected a "timing" problem. A computer's
timer, an internal clock of sorts, synchronizes all its operations; the Honey
well's timer "ticked" one million times per second. Barker, figuring that the
IMP crashed whenever a packet arrived between two of these ticks, worked
with Ornstein to correct the problem. At last, we test drove the machine with
no accidents for one full day?the last day we had before we had to ship it to
UCLA. Ornstein, for one, felt confident that it had passed the real test: "We
The creators of the IMP were (crouching, left to right) James Geisman,
David Waiden, Will Crowther; (next row) Truet Thach, William Bertell,
Frank Heart, Marty Thorpe, Severo Ornstein, Robert Kahn;
(rear) Ben Barker; (not pictured) Bernie Cosell. (1969)
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had two machines operating in the same room together at BBN

ference between a few feet of wire and a few hundred miles of
difference.... [W]e knew it was going to work."26
Off it went, air freight, across the country. Barker, who had
separate passenger flight, met the host team at UCLA, where L
rock managed about eight students, including Vinton Cerf as d
tain. When the IMP arrived, its size (about that of a refrigerato
(about half a ton) amazed everyone. Nonetheless, they placed its
battleship-gray, steel case tenderly beside their host comp
watched nervously as UCLA staff turned the machine on: it work
They ran a simulated transmission with their computer, and s
and its host were "talking" to each other flawlessly. When
news arrived back in Cambridge, Heart and the IMP gang erupt
On October i, 1969, the second IMP arrived at the Stanford R
stitute exactly on schedule. This delivery made the first real A
possible. With their respective IMPs connected across 350 m
leased, fifty-kilobit telephone line, the two host computers s
"talk." On October 3, they said "ello" and brought the world in
the Internet.27
The work that followed this inauguration certainly wasn't eas
free, but the solid foundation was undeniably in place. BBN and
completed the demonstration network, which added UC Santa
the University of Utah to the system, before the end of 1969. By
ARPANET encompassed the nineteen institutions that Larry
originally proposed. Furthermore, in little more than a year after
the four-host network, a collaborative working group had crea
set of operating instructions that would make certain the disp
ers could communicate with each other?that is, host-to-host p
work this group performed set certain precedents that went b
guidelines for remote logins (allowing the user at host "A" to c
computer at host "B") and file transfer. Steve Crocker at UCL
teered to keep notes of all the meetings, many of which were
ferences, wrote them so skillfully that no contributor felt humble
that the rules of the network had developed by cooperation,
Those first Network Control Protocols set the standard for the
improvement of the Internet and even the World Wide Web
person, group, or institution would dictate standards or rules
instead, decisions are made by international consensus.28
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ARPANET'S Rise and Demise
With the Network Control Protocol available, the ARPANET architects

could pronounce the entire enterprise a success. Packet switching, unequivo
cally, provided the means for efficient use of communication lines. An
economical and reliable alternate to circuit switching, the basis for the Bell
Telephone system, the ARPANET had revolutionized communication.
Despite the tremendous success achieved by BBN and the original host
sites, ARPANET was still underutilized by the end of 1971. Even the hosts
now plugged into the network often lacked the basic software that would
allow their computers to interface with their IMP. "The obstacle was the
enormous effort it took to connect a host to an IMP," one analyst explains.
"Operators of a host had to build a special-purpose hardware interface be
tween their computer and its IMP, which could take from 6 to 12 months.
They also needed to implement the host and network protocols, a job that re
quired up to 12 man-months of programming, and they had to make these
protocols work with the rest of the computer's operating system. Finally, they
had to adjust the applications developed for local use so they could be ac
cessed over the network."29 ARPANET worked, but its builders still needed
to make it accessible?and appealing.
Larry Roberts decided the time had come to put on a show for the public.
He arranged for a demonstration at the International Conference on Com
puter Communication held in Washington, D.C., ?n October 24-26, 1972.
Two fifty-kilobit lines installed in the hotel's ballroom connected to the
ARPANET and thence to forty remote computer terminals at various hosts.
On the exhibition's opening day, AT&T executives toured the event and, as if
planned just for them, the system crashed, bolstering their view that packet
switching would never replace the Bell system. Aside from that one mishap,
however, as Bob Kahn said after the conference, the "public reaction varied
from delight that we had so many people in one place doing all this stuff and
it all worked, to astonishment that it was even possible." Daily use of the net
work jumped immediately.30
Had ARPANET been restricted to its original purpose of sharing comput
ers and exchanging files, it would have been judged a minor failure, because
traffic seldom exceeded 25 percent of capacity. Electronic mail, also a mile
stone of 1972, had a great deal to do with drawing users in. Its creation and
eventual ease of use owed much to the inventiveness of Ray Tomlinson at
BBN (responsible, among other things, for choosing the @ icon for e-mail ad
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dresses), Larry Roberts, and John Vittal, also at BBN. By 197

of all traffic on the ARPANET was e-mail. "You know," Bob
"everyone really uses this thing for electronic mail." W
ARPANET soon became loaded to capacity.31
By 1983, the ARPANET contained 562 nodes and had b
that the government, unable to guarantee its security, divided
MILNET for government laboratories and ARPANET for
now existed in the company of many privately supported ne
some instituted by corporations such as IBM, Digital, and B
NASA established the Space Physics Analysis Network, a
works began forming across the country. Combinations of n
the Internet?became possible through a protocol developed
Bob Kahn. With its capacity far outstripped by these develo
inal ARPANET diminished in significance, until the gover
that it could save $14 million per year by closing it down. D
finally occurred by late 1989, just twenty years after th
"ello"?but not before other innovators, including Tim Ber
vised ways to expand the technology into the global system
World Wide Web.32
Early in the new century the number of homes connected
will equal the number that now have televisions. The Inter
wildly beyond early expectations because it has immense p
because it is, quite simply, fun.31 In the next stage of progr
grams, word processing, and the like will be centralized on
Homes and offices will have little hardware beyond a printer
where desired programs will flash up at voice command an
voice and body movements, rendering the familiar keyboa
tinct. And what else, beyond our imagination today?
Notes
i. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (New York
153.
2. The standard histories of the Internet are Funding a Revolution: Government Support
for Computing Research (Washington, D. C, 1999); Hafner and Lyon, Where Wiz
ards Stay Up Late; Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New
York, 1998); Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); and
David Hudson and Bruce Rinehart, Rewired (Indianapolis, 1997).
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3. J. C. R. Licklider, interview by William Aspray and Arthur Nor berg, Oct. 28,1988,
transcript, pp. 4-11, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota (cited
hereafter as CBI).
4. My papers, including the apppointment book referred to, are housed in the Leo
Beranek Papers, Institute Archives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cam
bridge, Mass. BBN's personnel records also shored up my memory here. Much of
what follows, however, unless otherwise cited, comes from my own recollections.
5. My recollections here were augmented by a personal discussion with Licklider.
6. Licklider, interview, pp. 12-17, CBI.
7. J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Machine Symbosis," IRE Transactions on Human Factors in
Electronics i(i96o):4-n.
8. John McCarthy, interview by William Aspray, Mar. 2, 1989, transcript, pp. 3,4,
CBI.
9. Licklider, interview, p. 19, CBI.
10. One of the primary motivations behind the ARPANET initiative was, according to
Taylor, "sociological" rather than "technical." He saw the opportunity to create a
countrywide discussion, as he explained later: "The events that got me interested in
networking had little to do with technical issues but rather with sociological issues.
I had witnessed [at those laboratories] that bright, creative people, by virtue of the
fact that they were beginning to use [time-shared systems] together, were forced to
talk to one another about, 'What's wrong with this? How do I do that? Do you
know anyone who has some data about this? ... I thought, 'Why couldn't we do
this across the country?' . . . This motivation . . . came to be known as the
ARPANET. [To succeed] I had to ... (1) convince ARPA, (2) convince IPTO con
tractors that they really wanted to be nodes on this network, (3) find a program
manager to run it, and (4) select the right group for the implementation of it all... .
A number of people [that I talked with] thought that. . . the idea of an interactive,
nation-wide network was not very interesting. Wes Clark and J. C. R. Licklider
were two who encouraged me." From remarks at The Path to Today, the University
of California?Los Angeles, Aug. 17, 1989, transcript, pp. 9-11, CBI.
11. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 71, 72.
12. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 73, 74, 75.
13. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 54, 61; Paul Baran, "On Distributed
Communications Networks," IEEE Transactions on Communications (1964)11-9,
12; Path to Today, pp. 17-21, CBI.
14. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 64-66; Segaller, Nerds, 62, 67, 82;
Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 26-41.
15. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 69, 70. Leonard Kleinrock stated in
1990 that "The mathematical tool that had been developed in queuing theory,
namely queuing networks, matched [when adjusted] the model of [later] computer
networks. . . . Then I developed some design procedures as well for optimal capac
ity assignment, routing procedures and topology design." Leonard Kleinrock, in
terview by Judy O'Neill, Apr. 3,1990, transcript, p. 8, CBI.
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Roberts didn't mention Kleinrock as a major contributor to the plann

ARPANET in his presentation at the UCLA conference in 1989, even
rock present. He stated: "I got this huge collection of reports [Paul Bara
... and suddenly I learned how to route packets. So we talked to Paul an
of his [packet switching] concepts and put together the proposal to go
ARPANET, the RFP, which, as you know, BBN won." Path to Today,
Frank Heart has since stated that "we were unable to use any of t
Kleinrock or Baran in the design of the ARPANET. We had to develo
ing features of the ARPANET ourselves." Telephone conversation be
and the author, Aug. 21, 2000.
16. Kleinrock, interview, p. 8, CBI.
17. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 78, 79, 75, 106; L
Roberts, "The ARPANET and Computer Networks," in A History o
Workstations, ed. A. Goldberg (New York, 1988), 150. In a joint paper
1968, Licklider and Robert Taylor also envisioned how such access could
of standard telephone lines without overwhelming the system. The
packet-switched network. J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, "The
as a Communication Device," Science and Technology 76(1969)111-31.
18. Defense Supply Service, "Request for Quotations," July 29,1968, D
0002, National Records Building, Washington, D.C. (copy of origina
courtesy of Frank Heart); Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up La
Roberts states: "The final product [the RFP] demonstrated that ther
problems to surmount before 'invention' had occurred. The BBN tea
significant aspects of the network's internal operations, such as routin
trol, software design, and network control. Other players [named in the
and my contributions were a vital part of the 'invention.'" Stated earlie
fied in an e-mail exchange with the author, Aug. 21, 2000.
Thus, BBN, in the language of a patent office, "reduced to practice" t
of a packet-switched wide-area network. Stephen Segaller writes tha
did invent was doing packet switching, rather than proposing and hypo
packet switching" (emphasis in original). Nerds, 82.
19. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 97.
20. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 100. BBN's work reduc
from ARPA's original estimation of 1/2 second to 1/20.
21. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 77. 102-106.
22. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 109-111.
23. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, in.
24. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 112.
25. Segaller, Nerds, 87.
26. Segaller, Nerds, 85.
27. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 150,151.
28. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 156,157.
29. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 78.
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30. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 78-80; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up
Late, 176-186; Segaller, Nerds, 106-109.
31. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 187-205. After what was really a
"hack" between two computers, Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote a mail program that
had two parts: one to send, called SNDMSG, and the other to receive, called
READMAIL. Larry Roberts further streamlined e-mail by writing a program for
listing the messages and a simple means for accessing and deleting them. Another
valuable contribution was "Reply," added by John Vittal, which allowed recipients
to answer a message without retyping the whole address.
32. Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercom
munication," IEEE Transactions on Communications COM-22 (May I974):637
648; Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (New York, 1999); Hafner and Lyon,
Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 253-256.
33. Janet Abbate wrote that "The ARPANET ... developed a vision of what a network
should be and worked out the techniques that would make this vision a reality. Cre
ating the ARPANET was a formidable task that presented a wide range of techni
cal obstacles. . . . ARPA did not invent the idea of layering [layers of addresses on
each packet]; however, the ARPANET'S success popularized layering as a network
ing technique and made it a model for builders of other networks. . . . The
ARPANET also influenced the design of computers . . . [and of] terminals that
could be used with a variety of systems rather than just a single local computer.
Detailed accounts of the ARPANET in the professional computer journals dissem
inated its techniques and legitimized packet switching as a reliable and economic
alternative for data communication. . . . The ARPANET would train a whole gen
eration of American computer scientists to understand, use, and advocate its new
networking techniques." Inventing the Internet, 80, 81.
75

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Roots of The Internet-A Personal History

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Roots of the Internet: A Personal History

Author(s): Leo Beranek

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25081152

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On October 3, 1969, two computers at remote locat

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the outlines of the Internet, could not grasp its potential or

During World War II, I served as director at Harvard's Elec

asked Licklider to serve on a committee that established Lincoln Laboratory,

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analog computers in the experimental psychology group, he replie

Photograph from Leo Beranek's

The prototype PDP-i arrived shortly after our discussions. A behemoth

He also identified "prerequisites for . . . effective, cooperative association,"

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In October 1962, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an office

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Lawrence Roberts from Lincoln Laboratory, whom Taylor recru

Lawrence Roberts (left), of ARPA, 1970s. Courtesy of Lawrence Roberts.

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Processors" (IMPs). Clark's plan exactly prefigured the Host-IMP relation

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would anyone want such a network when Americans alre

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Frank Heart explaining the first Interface Message Processor (IMP)

hard work paid off. On December 23,1968, a telegram arrived fro

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Interface Message Processor (IMP) with rear door open

would transfer electrical signals in it and would receive signals f

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had two machines operating in the same room together at BBN

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ARPANET'S Rise and Demise

With the Network Control Protocol available, the ARPANET architects

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dresses), Larry Roberts, and John Vittal, also at BBN. By 197

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Roberts didn't mention Kleinrock as a major contributor to the plann

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