Where Wizards Stay Up Late (23 page)
The Network Control Center had been watching and monitoring a slightly glitchy line in the network for the past few days. They thought they'd solved the problem that afternoon and had added the circuit back into the network. Within thirty seconds of McKenzie's call, the link was removed by the operators at the NCC and packets were flowing smoothly at the TIP again.
BBN's remote-management technology had never had a finer moment.
Later that evening, Jon Postel was in the exhibition room sitting at a keyboard, logged on to the host at UCLA. His team had designed a demonstration in which someone in Washington could pull up a file in Boston via the host computer in Los Angeles. The idea was to then print out the file in the exhibition room at the Hilton. When Postel shipped the file to the printer sitting beside him, nothing happened. He looked around the room. There were a lot of other demonstrations, one of which was a small robotic turtle built at MIT. The turtle was built to demonstrate how a computer program could be written to direct the motion of a machine. Kids could write their own programs in the LOGO language that said, “go left, go right, go forward, back up, move sideways,” and when the program was run, the turtle would do that. At the moment, however, the turtle was jumping up and down, twitching and jerking crazily. Instead of sending Postel's file to the printer, the system had accidentally sent it to the turtle port, and the robot dutifully offered its interpretation of what it took to be motion commands.
As an enthusiastic graduate student, Bob Metcalfe had undertaken the task of writing a booklet to accompany the demonstrations. It described nineteen scenarios for using the
ARPANET
, listed resources at various sites, and showed how to log on to a remote host, how to gain access to one of the applications, and how to control a program or engage in some kind of interactive communication over the network. There were several chess games, an interactive quiz about the geography of South America, a way of reading the Associated Press news wire over the network, and many other games, tools, and demonstrations. One of the more practical applications simulated an air traffic control scenario in which responsibility for monitoring an airplane flight is automatically handed off from one computer to another, representing different air traffic control centers, as the plane crosses geographic boundaries. Metcalfe's scenarios book was designed to walk participants, most of whom knew little about the
ARPANET
, through each demonstration step by step.
On Monday morning, the
ARPANET
computer scientists eagerly awaited their public. When curious conference-goers approached, the network guys, like Jehovah's Witnesses handing out copies of
The Watchtower,
thrust Metcalfe's scenarios book into their hands and ushered them into the room. Although it was possible to follow the instructions, to all but the initiated the scenarios book was fairly incomprehensible, and it was easy to foul up the system. One man sat down in front of a terminal and typed in an instruction from the book. For some reason or other, the host he was trying to reach wasn't functioning, or he miscued the thing. The message came back: “
HOST DEAD.
”
“Oh, my God. I've killed it!” he exclaimed. He wouldn't touch a terminal after that.
Other funny things happened. Two people had logged in to the University of Utah. One saw that somebody else he knew but had never met was logged in. They were in talk mode, and so he typed, “Where are you?” The other replied, “Well, I'm in Washington,” “Where in Washington?” “At the Hilton.” “Well, I'm at the Hilton, too.” The two turned out to be only a few feet from each other.
Some things weren't so funny. As the author of the scenarios book, Metcalfe was chosen to take ten AT&T executives on a virtual tour of the
ARPANET.
It was an odd sight: Young Metcalfe, with his big red beard, showing ten AT&T pinstriped businessmen around the network. In the middle of the demonstration the computers crashed. It was the first and only time the computers went down. The phone company executives'first reaction was to laugh.
“I looked up in pain,” said Metcalfe, “and I caught them smiling, delighted that packet-switching was flaky. This I will never forget. It confirmed for them that circuit-switching technology was here to stay, and this packet-switching stuff was an unreliable toy that would never have much impact in the commercial world, and now they could go home to New Jersey. It was clear to me they were tangled up in the past.”
Had they looked beyond the luckless Metcalfe and the failed demo, the AT&T executives would have seen the exuberance in other corners of the room. Not only did packet-switching work but it made wondrous things possible.
Some of the most ingenious demonstrations involved English-language conversational programs. These were elaborate programs constructed to engage a user in a verbal dialogue with a machine. There were four programs on display, two of which offered an especially fascinating glimpse into interactive computing.
PARRY, the first of these virtual conversationalists, mimicked the belief system of a paranoid psychotic. He held up his end of a conversation by offering canned responses to statements he thought he understood. Otherwise, his response was noncommittal. PARRY was the brainchild of Dr. Kenneth Colby at Stanford University.
The Doctor was another conversational program, based on ELIZA, a natural-language program written by MIT's Joseph Weizenbaum. The Doctor, which mimicked the behavior of a psychiatrist, was rather more diffident than PARRY. The Doctor accepted statements, then tried to produce new sentences based on the words and syntax of the other conversant. While the resulting conversation was altogether banal, users were often struck by how lifelike the quality of their conversations with the Doctor actually seemed. “People would sit down and interact with this thing,” observed Cerf. “And sometimes they'd ask other people to leave the room, because they thought they were having a private conversation.”
Cerf and others had toyed with the idea of setting up Colby's paranoid to have a “session” with the psychiatrist. Just a few weeks before the ICCC demonstration, PARRY indeed met the Doctor for an unusual conversation over the
ARPANET
, in an experiment orchestrated at UCLA. It perhaps marked the origin, in the truest sense, of all computer chat. There was no human intervention in the dialogue. PARRY was running at Stanford's artificial-intelligence lab, the Doctor was running on a machine at BBN, and at UCLA their input and output were cross-connected through the
ARPANET
, while the operators sat back and watched.
“Good evening,” said the Doctor. “Tell me your problems. Please terminate input with a period or a question mark.”
“
People get on my nerves sometimes,
” PARRY replied.
“I am not sure I understand you.”
“
You should pay more attention.
”
“Suppose you should pay more attention.”
”
You're entitled to your own opinion.
”
“What makes you think I am entitled to my own opinion?”
“
It bothers me just to be around people in general.
”
“Please go on.”
“
I went to the track at Bay Meadows a while back.
”
“Why do you say that just now?”
”
There's a lot of crooked gambling going on there.
”
“Please go on.”
“
I gamble on horses.
”
“What does that suggest to you?”
“
I went to the races.
”
“What else would you like to discuss?”
“
Gambling has been nothing but trouble for me.
”
“Why do you say that just now?”
”
I've had experience with crooks gambling at the track.
”
“I am not sure I understand you fully.”
“
Do you know anything about bookies?
”
“What makes you think I know anything about bookies?”
“
A bookie didn't pay me off once.
”
“What does that suggest to you?”
“
I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.
”
“Who are you really talking about?”
“
Have you ever really thought about the MAFIA?
”
“Suppose you ever really thought about the MAFIA.”
”
Let's talk about something else.
”
“I am not sure I understand you fully.”
“
You keep asking me the same things, why not change the topic?
”
“Why are such questions on your mind?
“
I thought I told you, people get on my nerves.
”
“Your nerves?”
“
I would rather not discuss that anymore.
”
“Would you like to discuss your nerves?”
“
I guess so.
”
“I am not sure I understand you fully.”
“
You harp on the same questions too much.
”
“What does that similarity suggest to you?”
“
I don't get you.
”
“Do you wish that you didn't get I?”
”
It's about time you showed some interest in my feelings.
”
“Oh? I showed some interest in your feelings?”
“
I will help you if I trust you.
”
“Do you wish that you trust I?”
“
Maybe yes, maybe no.
”
“You don't seem quite certain.”
“
In my opinion you have a one-track mind.
”
“What makes you think I have a one-track mind?”
“
I used to go to the track every week.
”
“What else would you like to discuss?
“
That's something I don't want to go into.
”
“Why do you say that just now?”
“
It's none of your business.
”
“Why are you concerned over my business?”
“
I don't confide in strangers.
”
“Don't you really confide in strangers?”
“
Let's change the subject.
”
“I'm not sure I understand you fully.”
“
What's wrong with you that you keep on bugging me about this?
”
“Please go on.”
“
You are a real nag.
”
“Does it please you to believe I am a real nag?”
“
I have had enough of this.
”
“What does that suggest to you?”
“
Goodbye.
”
“It's been my pleasure.
“Fear = 4.2223001
“Anger = 10
“Mistrust = 12.650703
“That's $399.29 please.”
Hundreds of people participated in the ICCC demonstration over its two and a half days. Executives, engineers, and technicians from the telecommunications and computer industries, a good number of them, entered the room skeptical of the
ARPANET
and packet-switching. Many left believing the technology might be real after all. For the most part, the forty-odd terminals worked, the resources were engaging, the TIP ran spectacularly, and the
ARPANET
came alive. “It was almost like the rail industry disbelieving that airplanes could really fly until they actually saw one in flight,” said Kahn.
The ICCC demonstration did more to establish the viability of packet-switching than anything else before it. As a result, the
ARPANET
community gained a much larger sense of itself, its technology, and the resources at its disposal. For computer makers, there was the realization that a market might emerge. “The sense in that room was not one of fear, or concern,” said Len Kleinrock. “It was excitement. I mean, here we could show it off, we knew it would work. Even if it fumbled, these things were fixable. It was a wonderfully exciting experience.” Roberts had shown steady confidence. He had gotten what he wanted, a more solidified effort, the foundation for a community, something he could build on. The crash efforts and panic that preceded the event had paid off. And on this day, even BBN and Honeywell were getting along.
Bob Kahn had just devoted a year of his life to demonstrating that resource-sharing over a network could really work. But at some point in the course of the event, he turned to a colleague and remarked, “You know, everyone really uses this thing for electronic mail.”
E-Mail
One September evening in 1973, Len Kleinrock was unpacking his bags when he discovered that he'd forgotten his razor. He'd just returned home to Los Angeles from Brighton, England, where he'd left the razor in a Sussex University dormitory bathroom. An ordinary electric razor, it was no big loss. “But it was mine,” he recalled, “and I wanted it back.”
Kleinrock had just come from a conference on computing and communications. The conference had brought together scientists from several countries, some of whom had begun developing digital networks under the auspices of their own governments. But the U.S. Government's
ARPANET
was by far the largest and most sophisticated network experiment in the world, and the international community welcomed the chance to see the project demonstrated. The organizers of the conference had also decided to use the occasion to test the transmission of data packets via satellite. For the conference, a temporary link from the United States had been patched into Brighton. Packets traveled over a satellite link from Virginia to an earth station in Cornwall, at Goonhilly Downs near Land's End, and from there a dedicated phone line was installed to connect with the University of London. From London a final hop was patched in to Brighton, where people had a chance to use the
ARPANET
just as if they were sitting in an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Menlo Park, California.
Kleinrock had returned to the States a day early, so when he realized he had forgotten his razor, he thought he might find someone still at the conference to retrieve it. There was a handy bit of software on the network called the resource-sharing executive, or
RSEXEC.
If you typed in “where so-and-so,”
RSEXEC
looked for so-and-so by searching the “who” listâa roster of everyone logged onâat each site. You could locate a person on the network this way if he happened to be logged on at that moment. “I asked myself what maniac would be logged in at three
A.M.
?” Kleinrock remembered. He went to his terminal and typed, “where roberts.”
A few minutes later, Kleinrock's terminal displayed the answer. Larry Roberts was indeed still in Brighton, awake, and at the moment connected to a BBN host in Cambridge. A Teletype number for Roberts also appeared on Kleinrock's screen, enough information for him to tap his colleague on the shoulder electronically from L.A.
“All I had to do was make a Teletype connection to BBN,” said Kleinrock. He linked to Roberts using TALK, which allowed them to converse by typing onto one half of a split screen while reading from the other. The two friends traded greetings. “I asked if he could retrieve the razor. He said, âSure, no problem.'” The next day the razor was returned by Danny Cohen, a mutual friend who had been at the conference and had come back to L.A.
There weren't any formal rules restricting use of the
ARPANET
by those with authorized access. Kleinrock's razor retrieval caper wasn't the first time anyone had pushed past official parameters in using the network. People were sending more and more personal messages. Rumor had it that even a dope deal or two had been made over some of the IMPs in Northern California. Still, tapping into the
ARPANET
to fetch a shaver across international lines was a bit like being a stowaway on an aircraft carrier. The
ARPANET
was an official federal research facility, after all, and not something to be toyed with. Kleinrock had the feeling that the stunt he'd pulled was slightly out of bounds. “It was a thrill. I felt I was stretching the Net.”
The
ARPANET
was not intended as a message system. In the minds of its inventors, the network was intended for resource-sharing, period. That very little of its capacity was actually ever used for resource-sharing was a fact soon submersed in the tide of electronic mail. Between 1972 and the early 1980s, e-mail, or network mail as it was referred to, was discovered by thousands of early users. The decade gave rise to many of the enduring features of modern digital culture: Flames, emoticons, the @ sign, debates on free speech and privacy, and a sleepless search for technical improvements and agreements about the technical underpinnings of it all. At first, e-mail was difficult to use, but by the end of the 1970s the big problems had been licked. The big rise in message traffic was to become the largest early force in the network's growth and development. E-mail was to the
ARPANET
what the Louisiana Purchase was to the young United States. Things only got better as the network grew and technology converged with the torrential human tendency to talk.
Electronic mail would become the long-playing record of cyberspace. Just as the LP was invented for connoisseurs and audiophiles but spawned an entire industry, electronic mail grew first among the elite community of computer scientists on the
ARPANET
, then later bloomed like plankton across the Internet. It was about the time Kleinrock was reaching for his razor that taboos were tumbling and the tone of message traffic on the Net started loosening up.
As cultural artifact, electronic mail belongs in a category somewhere between found art and lucky accidents. The
ARPANET
's creators didn't have a grand vision for the invention of an earth-circling message-handling system. But once the first couple of dozen nodes were installed, early users turned the system of linked computers into a personal as well as a professional communications tool. Using the
ARPANET
as a sophisticated mail system was simply a good hack. In those days hacking had nothing to do with malicious or destructive behavior; a good hack was a creative or inspired bit of programming. The best hackers were professionals. Meddlesome and malicious network users, of which there were virtually none at the outset, were first referred to as “network randoms” or “net randoms” or just plain “randoms.” It would be another decade before hacking was given a bad name.
In the decade before the
ARPANET
, computer scientists had devised ways of exchanging electronic messages within a time-sharing system. Researchers on the same time-sharing system each had a designated file, like an in-box, in the central machine. Colleagues could address short electronic messages to someone else's box, where only the recipient could read them. Messages could be dropped and picked up at any time. It was convenient, given the odd hours people kept. People within a single lab sent parades of one-liners back and forth, as well as longer memoranda and drafts of papers.
The first of these programs, called
MAILBOX
, was installed in the early 1960s on the Compatible Time-Sharing System at MIT. Similar mailboxes became a standard feature of almost every timesharing system built thereafter. In places where people were spread out, programmers working hundreds of yards apart could exchange messages without having to get up from their desks. But often, exchanging messages in a single machine, or domain, became a superfluous exerciseâlike two people using walkie-talkies to converse in a one-room cabin. People still got up from their desks and walked down the hall to talk. Said one user, ”I'll never forget a colleague who, while working in the next office, would constantly send me e-mail and it never failed to surprise him when I got up and walked next door to respond to him.”
By virtue of its geographic reach, the ARPA network changed all that, turning electronic mail from an interesting toy into a useful tool. The tendencies of the
ARPANET
community ran strongly democratic, with something of an anarchic streak. The
ARPANET
's earliest users were constantly generating a steady stream of new ideas, tinkering with old ones, pushing, pulling, or prodding their network to do this or that, spawning an atmosphere of creative chaos. The art of computer programming gave them room for endless riffs, and variations on any theme. One of the main themes became electronic mail.
The first electronic-mail delivery engaging two machines was done one day in 1972 by a quiet engineer, Ray Tomlinson at BBN. Sometime earlier, Tomlinson had written a mail program for Tenex, the BBN-grown operating system that, by now, was running on most of the
ARPANET
's PDP-10 machines. The mail program was written in two parts: To send messages, you'd use a program called
SNDMSG
; to receive mail, you'd use the other part called
READMAIL.
He hadn't actually intended for the program to be used on the
ARPANET.
Like other mailbox programs of the day, it was created for time-sharing systems and designed only to handle mail locally, within individual PDP-10s, not across them.
But Tomlinson, an inveterate experimenter, decided to take advantage of having two PDP-10 computers set up in the Cambridge office; in fact, they were the same machines BBN was using to connect to the
ARPANET.
Weeks earlier, Tomlinson had written an experimental file-transfer protocol called
CPYNET.
Now he modified the program so that it could carry a mail message from one machine and drop it into a file on another. When he tried it, and sent mail from one PDP-10 to the other, the little hack worked, and even though his mail hadn't actually gone out onto the open network, it had crossed an important historical divide. Tomlinson's
CPYNET
hack was a breakthrough; now there was nothing holding e-mail back from crossing the wider Net. Although in technical terms Tomlinson's program was trivial, culturally it was revolutionary. “
SENDMSG
opened the door,” said Dave Crocker, the younger brother of Steve Crocker and an e-mail pioneer. “It created the first interconnectivity, then everyone took it from there.”
But how to get this invention running out on the network? The answer lay in the file-transfer protocol. In July 1972, one evening at Tech Square at MIT, as Abhay Bhushan was writing the final specifications for the
ARPANET
file-transfer protocol, someone suggested piggybacking Tomlinson's e-mail programs onto the end product. Why not? If electronic messages could ride on
CPYNET
, they might just as well ride on the file-transfer protocol. Bhushan and others worked out some modifications. In August, when Jon Postel received an RFC outlining the e-mail feature, he thought to himself, “Now there's a nice hack.” The
ARPANET
's first electronic mail-handling twins, named MAIL and MLFL, came to life.
Tomlinson became well known for
SNDMSG
and
CPYNET.
But he became better known for a brilliant (he called it obvious) decision he made while writing those programs. He needed a way to separate, in the e-mail address, the name of the user from the machine the user was on. How should that be denoted? He wanted a character that would not, under any conceivable circumstances, be found in the user's name. He looked down at the keyboard he was using, a Model 33 Teletype, which almost everyone else on the Net used, too. In addition to the letters and numerals there were about a dozen punctuation marks. “I got there first, so I got to choose any punctuation I wanted,” Tomlinson said. “I chose the @ sign.” The character also had the advantage of meaning “at” the designated institution. He had no idea he was creating an icon for the wired world.
Stephen Lukasik, a physicist who directed ARPA from 1971 to 1975, was among the first users and great advocates of network mail. His favorite part of ARPA, in fact, was Larry Roberts's Information Processing Techniques Office. Lukasik had begun his career in the 1950s working for BBN and MIT as a graduate student. He joined ARPA in 1966 to work on nuclear test detection, and he had watched the creation of the
ARPANET.
During his rise to the directorship, Lukasik had fought especially hard to protect the computer science community's funding. ARPA was under pressure to do defense-related work. He saw computing as a more fundamental but important technology and defended it as such before Congress.
But sometimes things went a bit too far. As director, he walked around a lot, dropping in on people in their offices. One day he was in the IPT Office when he noticed a folder lying on top of a file cabinet. Its orange cover (“not my favorite color”) caught his eye. The folder was labeled “Computer-Assisted Choreography.” It contained progress reports on a project that used dancers' movements to map human motions by computer. “I went ballistic,” he said. He could picture the headline:
PENTAGON FUNDS DANCE RESEARCH.
Lukasik told his staff to tell the scientists, if ”you're going to do something that looks like it's forty thousand miles away from defense, please leave our name off of it.” He understood the research and didn't care if they did it, but didn't want them bragging about it. Steve Crocker, now an IPTO program manager working under Roberts, was glad he wasn't the one overseeing the dance automation project. But he did have a small problem of his own with researchers he was funding at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab. “On random unannounced visits, they would show me proudly the lab's quadraphonic simulation of a buzzing flyâwhich ate up twenty-five percent of the computing resources there,” Crocker said.
One of the first things Lukasik had done upon being named head of the agency was get Roberts to give him an e-mail address and access to the
ARPANET.
It was unusual for someone who wasn't a computer scientist to be interested in using network mail, and more unusual for anyone to grow as reliant on it as Lukasik did.
A frequent flier, Lukasik seldom boarded a plane without lugging aboard his thirty-pound “portable” Texas Instruments terminal with an acoustic coupler, so he could dial in and check his messages from the road. “I really used it to manage ARPA,” Lukasik recalled. “I would be at a meeting, and every hour I would dial up my mail. I encouraged everybody in sight to use it.” He pushed it on all his office directors and they pushed it on others. ARPA managers noticed that e-mail was the easiest way to communicate with the boss, and the fastest way to get his quick approval on things.
