Where Wizards Stay Up Late (6 page)

(Later, after the project was under way, Roberts would arrange with Howard Frank, an expert in the field of network topology, to carry out computer-based analyses on how to lay out the network most cost-effectively. Still, for years Roberts had the network's layout, and the technical particulars that defined it, sharply pictured inside his head.)

A lot was already known about how to build complicated communications networks to carry voice, sound, and other more elemental signals. AT&T, of course, had absolute hegemony when it came to the telephone network. But the systematic conveyance of information predated Ma Bell by at least a few thousand years. Messenger systems date at least as far back as the reign of Egyptian King Sesostris I, almost four thousand years ago. The first relay system, where a message was passed from one guard station to the next, came about in 650
B.C.
For hundreds of years thereafter, invention was driven by the necessity for greater speed as the transmission of messages from one place to another progressed through pigeons, shouters, coded flags, mirrors, lanterns, torches, and beacons. Then, in 1793, the first tidings were exchanged using semaphores—pivoting vanes on a tower that resembled a person holding signal flags in outstretched arms.

By the mid-1800s telegraph networks were relying on electricity, and Western Union Telegraph Company had begun blanketing the United States with a network of wires for transmitting messages in the form of electric pulses. The telegraph was a classic early example of what is called a “store-and-forward network.” Because of electrical losses, the signals had to be switched forward through a sequence of relay stations. At first, messages arriving at switching centers were transcribed by hand and forwarded via Morse code to the next station. Later, arriving messages were stored automatically on typed paper ribbons until an operator could retype the message for the next leg. By 1903, arriving messages were encoded on a snippet of paper tape as a series of small holes, and the torn tape was hung on a hook. Tapes were taken in turn from the hooks by clerks and fed through a tape reader that automatically forwarded them by Morse code.

By the middle of the twentieth century, after the telephone had supplanted the telegraph as the primary means of communication, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company held a complete—albeit strictly regulated—monopoly on long-distance communications within the United States. The company was tenacious about its stronghold on both telephone service and the equipment that made such service possible. Attachment of foreign (non-Bell) equipment to Bell lines was forbidden on the grounds that foreign devices could damage the entire telephone system. Everything added to the system had to work with existing equipment. In the early 1950s a company began manufacturing a device called a Hush-A-Phone, a plastic mouthpiece cover designed to permit a caller to speak into a telephone without being overheard. AT&T succeeded in having the Federal Communications Commission ban the device after presenting expert witnesses who described how the Hush-A-Phone damaged the telephone system by reducing telephone quality. In another example of AT&T's zeal, the company sued an undertaker in the Midwest who was giving out free plastic phone-book covers. AT&T argued that a plastic phone-book cover obscured the advertisement on the cover of the Yellow Pages and reduced the value of the paid advertising, revenues that helped reduce the cost of telephone service.

There was almost no way to bring radical new technology into the Bell System to coexist with the old. It wasn't until 1968, when the FCC permitted the use of the Carterfone—a device for connecting private two-way radios with the telephone system—that AT&T's unrelenting grip on the nation's telecommunications system loosened. Not surprisingly, then, in the early 1960s, when ARPA began exploring an entirely new way of transmitting information, AT&T wanted no part of it.

Just as living creatures evolve through a process of mutation and natural selection, ideas in science and their applications in technology do the same. Evolution in science, as in nature—normally a gradual sequence of changes—occasionally makes a revolutionary leap breaking with the course of development. New ideas emerge simultaneously but independently. And so they did when the time was ripe for inventing a new way of transmitting information.

In the early 1960s, before Larry Roberts had even set to work creating a new computer network, two other researchers, Paul Baran and Donald Davies—completely unknown to each other and working continents apart toward different goals—arrived at virtually the same revolutionary idea for a new kind of communications network. The realization of their concepts came to be known as packet-switching.

Paul Baran was a good-humored immigrant from Eastern Europe. He was born in 1926, in what was then Poland. His parents sought refuge in the United States two years later, following a lengthy wait for immigration papers. The family arrived in Boston, where Paul's father went to work in a shoe factory, and later settled in Philadelphia, where he opened a small grocery store. As a boy, Paul delivered groceries for his dad using a small red wagon. Once when he was five, he asked his mother if they were rich or poor. “We're poor,” she responded. Later he asked his father the same question. “We're rich,” the older Baran replied, providing his son with the first of many such existential conundrums in his life.

Paul eventually attended school two streetcar hops from home at Drexel Institute of Technology, which later became Drexel University. He was put off by the school's heavy-handed emphasis in those days on rapid numerical problem solving: Two trivial arithmetic errors on a test (racing against a clock), and you failed, regardless of whether or not you fundamentally understood the problems. At the time, Drexel was trying to create a reputation for itself as a tough, no-nonsense place and took pride in its high dropout rate. Drexel instructors told their budding engineers that employers wanted only those who could calculate quickly and correctly. To his dismay, Baran saw many bright, imaginative friends forced out by the school's “macho attitude” toward math. But he stuck it out, and in 1949 earned a degree in electrical engineering.

Jobs were scarce, so he took the first offer that came, from the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. In the relatively mundane capacity of technician, he tested parts for radio tubes and germanium diodes on the first commercial computer—the
UNIVAC.
Baran soon married, and he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he took a job at Hughes Aircraft working on radar data processing systems. He took night classes at UCLA on computers and transistors, and in 1959 he received a master's degree in engineering.

Baran left Hughes in late 1959 to join the computer science department in the mathematics division at the RAND Corporation while continuing to take classes at UCLA. Baran was ambivalent, but his advisor at UCLA, Jerry Estrin, urged him to continue his studies toward a doctorate. Soon a heavy travel schedule was forcing him to miss classes. But it was finally divine intervention, he said, that sparked his decision to abandon the doctoral work. “I was driving one day to UCLA from RAND and couldn't find a single parking spot in all of UCLA nor the entire adjacent town of Westwood,” Baran recalled. “At that instant I concluded that it was God's will that I should discontinue school. Why else would He have found it necessary to fill up all the parking lots at that exact instant?”

Soon after Baran had arrived at RAND, he developed an interest in the survivability of communications systems under nuclear attack. He was motivated primarily by the hovering tensions of the cold war, not the engineering challenges involved. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were in the process of building hair-trigger nuclear ballistic missile arsenals. By 1960, the escalating arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union heightened the threat of Doomsday—nuclear annihilation—over daily life in both countries.

Baran knew, as did all who understood nuclear weapons and communications technology, that the early command and control systems for missile launch were dangerously fragile. For military leaders, the “command” part of the equation meant having all the weapons, people, and machines of the modern military at their disposal and being able “to get them to do what you want them to do,” as one analyst explained. “Control” meant just the opposite—“getting them
not
to do what you don't want them to.” The threat of one country or the other having its command systems destroyed in an attack and being left unable to launch a defensive or retaliatory strike gave rise to what Baran described as “a dangerous temptation for either party to misunderstand the actions of the other and fire first.”

As the strategists at RAND saw it, it was a necessary condition that the communications systems for strategic weapons be able to survive an attack, so the country's retaliatory capability could still function. At the time, the nation's long-distance communications networks were indeed extremely vulnerable and unable to withstand a nuclear attack. Yet the president's ability to call for, or call off, the launch of American missiles (called “minimal essential communication”), relied heavily on the nation's vulnerable communications systems. So Baran felt that working on the problem of building a more stable communications infrastructure—namely a tougher, more robust network—was the most important work he could be doing.

Baran wasn't the first at RAND to think about this problem. In fact, it was RAND's stock in trade to study such things. RAND had been set up in 1946 to preserve the nation's operations research capability developed during World War II. Most of its contracts came from the Air Force. The problem of the communications system's survivability was something that RAND's communications division was working on, but with limited success. Baran was one of the first to determine, at least on a theoretical level, that the problem was indeed solvable. And he was unquestionably the first to see that the way to solve it was by applying digital computer technology.

Few of the electronics experts in other departments at RAND knew much about the emerging field of digital computer technology, and even fewer seemed interested. Baran recalled his sense of how different his own thinking was from theirs: “Many of the things I thought possible would tend to sound like utter nonsense, or impractical, depending on the generosity of spirit in those brought up in an earlier world.” And it wasn't just his colleagues at RAND who cast a skeptical eye on Baran's thinking. The traditional communications community at large quickly dismissed his ideas as not merely racy, but untenable.

Instead of shying away, Baran just dove deeper into his work. RAND allowed investigators sufficient freedom to pursue their own ideas, and by late 1960 Baran's interest and knowledge of networks had grown into a small independent project. Convinced of the merit of his ideas, he embarked on writing a series of comprehensive technical papers to respond to objections previously raised and explain in increasing detail what he was proposing. The work, as he explained years later, was done not out of intellectual curiosity nor any desire to publish. “It was done in response to the most dangerous situation that ever existed,” he said.

At the Pentagon, Baran found planners who were thinking in unemotional terms about postattack scenarios and making quantitative estimates of the destruction that would result from a Soviet nuclear ballistic missile attack. “The possibility of a war exists, but there is much that can be done to minimize the consequences,” Baran wrote. “If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black-and-white manner, then it follows that we should do those things that make the shade of gray as light as possible: to plan now to minimize potential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permit the survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy swiftly.”

Baran's first paper revealed glimpses of his nascent, revolutionary ideas about the theory and structure of communications networks. He had arrived tentatively at the notion that a data network could be made more robust and reliable by introducing higher levels of redundancy. Computers were key. Independently of Licklider and others in computing's avant-garde, Baran saw well beyond mainstream computing, to the future of digital technologies and the symbiosis between humans and machines.

Baran was working on the problem of how to build communications structures whose surviving components could continue to function as a cohesive entity after other pieces were destroyed. He had long talks with Warren McCulloch, an eminent psychiatrist at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. They discussed the brain, its neural net structures, and what happens when some portion is diseased, particularly how brain functions can sometimes recover by sidestepping a dysfunctional region. “Well, gee, you know,” Baran remembered thinking, “the brain seems to have some of the properties that one would need for real stability.” It struck him as significant that brain functions didn't rely on a single, unique, dedicated set of cells. This is why damaged cells can be bypassed as neural nets re-create themselves over new pathways in the brain.

The notion of dividing a single large vulnerable structure into many parts, as a defense mechanism, can be seen in many other applications. The concept is not entirely dissimilar to the idea of segmented or compartmentalized structures used in modern ship hulls or gasoline tanker trucks. If only one or two areas of the skin are ruptured, only a section of the overall structure loses its utility, not the whole thing. Some terrorist groups and espionage operations employ a similar kind of compartmentalized organization to thwart authorities, who might eliminate one cell without jeopardizing the whole group.