Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon

Author:Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon [Hafner, Katie & Lyon, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, General, Computers, Networking, Internet
ISBN: 9780684832678
Google: H6ZzQhM0vSYC
Amazon: B000FC0WP6
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1998-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

A Real Network

A month after the first IMP was installed at UCLA, IMP Number Two arrived at SRI, right on schedule on October 1, 1969. That same month, Bob Taylor left ARPA. He had long since removed himself from the details of the network project. As he explained it, in the 1960s, “ARPA” was a magic word. Taylor’s office was often called upon to sort out problems that others couldn’t. In 1967 and 1968, Taylor had been sent repeatedly to Vietnam to help straighten out, among other things, the controversy over the Army’s “body count” reports handled by the military information centers. The experience had left Taylor burned out. He took a post at the University of Utah.

Many milestones in the network experiment had been passed so far: Taylor’s funding victory and successful wooing of Roberts; Roberts’s network concept; BBN’s construction and delivery of the first IMP. But the installation of IMP Number Two marked the most important achievement to date. At last the researchers could connect two disparate computers and get them talking to each other like a couple of old comrades.

Like the UCLA team earlier, SRI’s group had a similar mad scramble getting ready for the arrival of the IMP. One crucial difference between the two sites was that whereas the UCLA guys disliked their Sigma-7, the SRI guys loved their host computer, an SDS 940. Like the Sigma-7, the 940 was built by Scientific Data Systems. But the Sigma-7 had been designed as a commercial processor, whereas the 940 was basically an academic device, a revolutionary time-sharing system first put together by a team of Berkeley researchers, later to be sold under the SDS nameplate. As a result, it was far more fun to program than the Sigma-7.

Bill Duvall, an SRI researcher, spent about a month writing a clever program for the 940 that essentially fooled it into thinking it was communicating not with another computer but with a “dumb” terminal. A dumb terminal can neither compute nor store information; it serves only to display the most recent set of information sent to it by the computer to which it’s linked. Duvall’s program was a very specific interim solution to the host-tohost communication problem. For weeks, the UCLA researchers had been preparing for their first log-in session by actually dialing into the SRI system long-distance using a modem and a teletype, to familiarize themselves with SRI’s time-sharing system. With both IMPs now in place, and both hosts running, the moment to test the actual two–node ARPA network had finally arrived.

The first thing to do, of course, was to connect. Unlike most systems today, which prompt the user for a log-in name and password, the SRI system waited for a command before acknowledging a connection. “L-O-G-I-N” was one of those commands.

Fastened to the first IMPs like a barnacle was a small phonelike box, with a cord and headset. It shared the line with the IMPs and used a subchannel intended for voice conversations. The voice line was, like the data line, a dedicated link.

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