Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Matthew Lyon & Matthew Lyon

Author:Matthew Lyon & Matthew Lyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

IMP Number Three was installed at UC Santa Barbara on November 1. For the Santa Barbara installation, Barker flew out to California again. By this time, Heart was more relaxed. There were few traces of the suspense that had attended the first trip. In fact, installing IMPs was beginning to seem routine.

Later that month, Larry Roberts decided to fly to California to inspect the network firsthand for the first time. Roberts didn’t like to travel. When he did travel, he never left to catch his plane until the last minute. It drove his secretary crazy, but he missed only one plane that anyone could remember. That happened one afternoon when he was stopped for speeding on his way to Dulles Airport. Convinced that he hadn’t been going too fast, Roberts decided to contest the ticket. He had been pulled over by the squad car near the point at which he had come onto the George Washington Parkway after a full stop, and his contention was that in that short distance he could not possibly have accelerated his Volkswagen Beetle to the speed alleged by the officer. Roberts went back to the scene and carefully measured off the distances. He gathered data on the engine output and weight of his VW bug, factored in Newton’s law of inertia and made a few other calculations, and was prepared to go before a judge to make his case. It wasn’t until friends convinced him he was unlikely to get a judge with a physics degree that he conceded the point and paid the fine instead of taking it to court.

Fortunately, there were no speeding tickets on this trip. Roberts and his program manager, Barry Wessler, flew to California without incident, and in Kleinrock’s lab at Boelter Hall they watched the network in operation. This time, Kleinrock did the typing and in less than a minute he had logged on to the host computer at SRI. Roberts watched closely and left satisfied that the experiment was succeeding.

Fourth was Utah. By now it was December—prime ski season. There also happened to be a Network Working Group meeting scheduled at the site. Keen skiers all, the whole BBN team, even Frank Heart, went to Salt Lake City to plug in the IMP. (Ironically, Barker was the only one excluded from the Utah trip—a fact he would not let the others forget for many years.)

The layout of the growing number of communications links was becoming an interesting problem. For one thing, there was not a point-to-point link between every pair of sites. For reasons of economy, Roberts decided that no direct link was needed between UCLA and Utah, or between Santa Barbara and Utah, so that all traffic destined for Utah had to go through the IMP at SRI. That was fine as long as it was up and running. If it crashed, the network would divide and Utah would be cut off until SRI was brought back on-line. As it would turn out, the four-node network that Roberts designed was not a robust web of redundant connections.

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