Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

by Katie Hafner

  WHERE WIZARDS STAY UP LATE

  (THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET)

  Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon

  * * *

  A DF Books NERDs Release

  TOUCHSTONE

  Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

  Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com

  Copyright © 1996 by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Touchstone Edition 1998 TOUCHSTONEand colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 0-684-87216-1

  To the memory of J. C. R. Licklider and to the memory of Cary Lu

  * * *

  Also by Katie Hafner

  The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany

  Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier(with John Markoff)

  The Origins of the Internet Katie Hafnerand Matthew Lyon A TOUCHSTONE BOOK Published by Simon & Schuster

  * * *

  Contents

  Prologue

  1.The Fastest Million Dollars

  2.A Block Here, Some Stones There

  3.The Third University

  4.Head Down in the Bits

  5.Do It to It Truett

  6.Hacking Away and Hollering

  7.E-Mail

  8. A Rocket on Our Hands

  Epilogue

  Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  * * *

  Los Alamos’ lights where wizards stay up late

  (Stay in the car, forget the gate)

  To save the world or end it, time will tell

  —James Merrill,

  “Under Libra: Weights and Measures,”

  from Braving the Elements

  Prologue

  September 1994

  They came to Boston from as far away as London and Los Angeles, several dozen middle-aged men, reuniting for a fall weekend in 1994 to celebrate what they had done twenty-five years earlier. These were the scientists and engineers who had designed and built theARPANET, the computer network that revolutionized communications and gave rise to the global Internet. They had worked in relative obscurity in the 1960s; a number of them had been only graduate students when they made significant contributions to the network. Others had been mentors. Most of them had never gained much recognition for the achievement.

  Bolt Beranek and Newman, a computer company based in Cambridge, had been their center of gravity, had employed many of them, had built and operated the original ARPA network, then slipped into relative obscurity as the Internet grew like a teeming city around its earliest neighborhood. Now, a quarter-century after installing the first network node, BBN had invited all of theARPANETpioneers to come together, hoping to heighten its own profile by throwing a lavish celebration marking the anniversary.

  Many of those at the reunion hadn’t seen one another or been in touch for years. As they filtered into the lobby of the Copley Plaza for a Friday afternoon press conference kicking off the celebration, they scanned the room for familiar faces.

  Bob Taylor, the director of a corporate research facility in Silicon Valley, had come to the party for old times sake, but he was also on a personal mission to correct an inaccuracy of long standing. Rumors had persisted for years that theARPANEThad been built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear attack. It was a myth that had gone unchallenged long enough to become widely accepted as fact.

  Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge.

  Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. WhenTimemagazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank.

  Across the room at dinner that night at the Copley, Taylor spotted an elderly, heavyset man with a thick mustache. He recognized him immediately as the one person who could convincingly corroborate his story. It was his old boss, Charlie Herzfeld, who had been the director of ARPA when Taylor worked there. The two men had last seen each other years earlier, before anyone else cared about how the network began. Seeing Herzfeld now, Taylor was buoyed. He was back among the people who knew the real story. Now they’d straighten things out.

  1 The Fastest Million Dollars

  February 1966

  Bob Taylor usually drove to work, thirty minutes through the rolling countryside northeast of Washington, over the Potomac River to the Pentagon. There, in the morning, he’d pull into one of the vast parking lots and try to put his most-prized possession, a BMW 503, someplace he could remember. There were few if any security checkpoints at the entrances to the Pentagon in 1966. Taylor breezed in wearing his usual attire: sport coat, tie, button-down short-sleeve shirt, and slacks. Thirty thousand other people swarmed through the concourse level daily, in uniform and mufti alike, past the shops and up into the warrens of the enormous building.

  Taylor’s office was on the third floor, the most prestigious level in the Pentagon, near the offices of the secretary of defense and the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The offices of the highest-ranking officials in the Pentagon were in the outer, or E-ring. Their suites had views of the river and national monuments. Taylor’s boss, Charles Herzfeld, the head of ARPA, was among those with a view, in room 3E160. The ARPA director rated the highest symbols of power meted out by the Department of Defense (DOD), right down to the official flags beside his desk. Taylor was director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), just a corridor away, an unusually independent section of ARPA charged with supporting the nation’s most advanced computer research-and-development projects.

  The IPTO director’s suite, where Taylor hung his coat from 1965 to 1969, was located in the D-ring. What his office lacked in a view was compensated for by its comfort and size. It was a plushly carpeted and richly furnished room with a big desk, a heavy oak conference table, glass-fronted bookcases, comfortable leather chairs, and all the other trappings of rank, which the Pentagon carefully measured out even down to the quality of the ashtrays. (Traveling on military business, Taylor carried the rank of one-star general.) On one wall of his office was a large map of the world; a framed temple rubbing from Thailand hung prominently on another.

  Inside the suite, beside Taylor’s office, was another door leading to a small space referred to as the terminal room. There, side by side, sat three computer terminals, each a different make, each connected to a separate mainframe computer running at three separate sites. There was a modified IBM Selectric typewriter terminal connected to a computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. A Model 33 Teletype terminal, resembling a metal desk with a large noisy typewriter embedded in it, was linked to a computer at the University of California in Berkeley. And another Teletype terminal, a Model 35, was dedicated to a computer in Santa Monica, California, called, cryptically enough, the
AN/FSQ 32XD1A, nicknamed the Q-32, a hulking machine built by IBM for the Strategic Air Command. Each of the terminals in Taylor’s suite was an extension of a different computing environment—different programming languages, operating systems, and the like—within each of the distant mainframes. Each had a different log-in procedure; Taylor knew them all. But he found it irksome to have to remember which log-in procedure to use for which computer. And it was still more irksome, after he logged in, to be forced to remember which commands belonged to which computing environment. This was a particularly frustrating routine when he was in a hurry, which was most of the time.

  The presence of three different computer terminals in Taylor’s Pentagon office reflected IPTO’s strong connection to the leading edge of the computer research community, resident in a few of the nation’s top universities and technical centers. In all, there were some twenty principal investigators, supporting dozens of graduate students, working on numerous projects, all of them funded by Taylor’s small office, which consisted of just Taylor and a secretary. Most of IPTO’s $19 million budget was being sent to campus laboratories in Boston and Cambridge, or out to California, to support work that held the promise of making revolutionary advances in computing. Under ARPA’s umbrella, a growing sense of community was emerging in computer research in the mid-1960s. Despite the wide variety of projects and computer systems, tight bonds were beginning to form among members of the computer community. Researchers saw each other at technical conferences and talked by phone; as early as 1964 some had even begun using a form of electronic mail to trade comments, within the very limited proximity of their mainframe computers.

  Communicating with that community from the terminal room next to Taylor’s office was a tedious process. The equipment was state of the art, but having a room cluttered with assorted computer terminals was like having a den cluttered with several television sets, each dedicated to a different channel. “It became obvious,” Taylor said many years later, “that we ought to find a way to connect all these different machines.”

  A Research Haven

  That there even existed an agency within the Pentagon capable of supporting what some might consider esoteric academic research was a tribute to the wisdom of ARPA’s earliest founders. The agency had been formed by President Dwight Eisenhower in the period of national crisis following the Soviet launch of the firstSputniksatellite in October 1957. The research agency was to be a fast-response mechanism closely tied to the president and secretary of defense, to ensure that Americans would never again be taken by surprise on the technological frontier. President Eisenhower saw ARPA fitting nicely into his strategy to stem the intense rivalries among branches of the military over research-and-development programs. The ARPA idea began with a man who was neither scientist nor soldier, but soap salesman.

  At fifty-two, Neil McElroy was a newcomer to the defense establishment. He had never worked in government, had never lived in Washington, and had no military experience except in the national guard. For thirty-two years, he had climbed the corporate ladder at Procter & Gamble, the giant soap manufacturer in Cincinnati.

  A Harvard graduate, McElroy took his first job at P&G slitting envelopes as a mail clerk in the advertising department for twenty-five dollars a week. It was supposed to be a summer job; he had intended to enter business school in the fall. But he stayed on and began peddling soap door-to-door. Soon he became promotion manager. From there, he worked his way up by pioneering the selling of soap on radio and television. The TV soap opera was McElroy’s brainchild, about which he once said without apology, “The problem of improving literary taste is one for the schools. Soap operas sell lots of soap.” By 1957, P&G was selling about a billion dollars’worth of Ivory, Oxydol, Joy, and Tide every year. He had perfected the strategy of promoting brand-name competition—as if there were real differences—between similar products made by the same company. And for the past nine years, tall, handsome “Mac” as he was known to most (or “Soapy Mac from Cinci-O” to some), had been the company’s president—until Eisenhower recruited him for his cabinet.

  On the evening of Friday, October 4, 1957, President Eisenhower’s new nominee for secretary of defense, McElroy, was in Huntsville, Alabama. He had already been confirmed by the Senate and was touring military installations in advance of his swearing-in. A large entourage of Pentagon staff was in tow for Mac’s tour of Redstone Arsenal, home of the Army’s rocket program. At about six o’clock in the evening in the officers’ club, McElroy was talking to German émigré Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, when an aide rushed up and announced that the Russians had succeeded in launching a satellite into earth orbit. Now suddenly, even before taking office, McElroy found himself engulfed in a crisis of huge proportions. In one night, the Soviet achievement had reduced America’s booming postwar confidence and optimism to widening fear and despair. Suddenly “the spectre of wholesale destruction,” in the president’s words, bore down on the American psyche.

  Five days later McElroy was sworn in, with Washington fully consumed in controversy over the question of who had let the Soviets steal the march on American science and technology. Some people had predicted the Soviets would launch a satellite in observance of the International Geophysical Year. “Their earlier preaching in the wilderness was redeemed by the Soviet scientific spectaculars,” one observer said. “It now took on the aura of revealed truth.” “I told you so” became a status symbol. Genuine fear, ominous punditry, and harsh criticism flowed around the central issue of the new Soviet threat to national security. Hysterical prophecies of Soviet domination and the destruction of democracy were common.Sputnikwas proof of Russia’s ability to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, the pessimists said, and it was just a matter of time before the Soviets would threaten the United States. The least-panicked Americans were resigned to disappointment over Russia’s lead in the race to explore space.

  Eisenhower hadn’t wanted a seasoned military expert heading the Pentagon; he was one himself. The president distrusted the military-industrial complex and the fiefdoms of the armed services. His attitude toward them sometimes bordered on contempt.

  By contrast, he loved the scientific community. He found scientists inspiring—their ideas, their culture, their values, and their value to the country—and he surrounded himself with the nation’s best scientific minds. Eisenhower was the first president to host a White House dinner specifically to single out the scientific and engineering communities as guests of honor, just as the Kennedys would later play host to artists and musicians.

  Hundreds of prominent American scientists directly served the Eisenhower administration on various panels. He referred to them proudly as “my scientists.” Ike “liked to think of himself as one of us,” observed Detlev W. Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences.

  Two prominent scientists once had breakfast with the president, and as they were leaving Eisenhower remarked that the Republican National Committee was complaining that scientists close to the him were not out “whooping it up” sufficiently for the Republican Party.

  ”Don’t you know, Mr. President?” replied one of the men with a smile. “All scientists are Democrats.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Eisenhower shot back. “But anyway, I like scientists for their science and not for their politics.” When the Sputnikcrisis hit, Eisenhower pulled his scientists still more tightly into his circle. First, he held a number of private meetings with prominent scientists from outside the government. Eleven days after the news of the Soviet satellite, on October 15, 1957, Eisenhower sat down for a lengthy discussion with his Science Advisory Committee, a full contingent of the nation’s best minds. Neither he nor any of them was as concerned about the actual significance ofSputnikas were those who were using the issue against Ike. For one thing, Eisenhower knew a great deal more than he could say publicly about the status of the Russian missile programs; he had seen the exquisitely detailed spy photographs made from a U-2 s
py plane. He knew there was no missile gap. He also knew that the American military and its contractors had a vested interest in the Soviet threat. Still, he asked his science advisors for their estimation of Soviet capability. Eisenhower listened closely as they soberly assessed the meaning of theSputniklaunch. They told him the Russians had indeed gained impressive momentum. They said the United States would lose its scientific and technological lead unless it mobilized.

  Many of the scientists around Eisenhower had been worrying since the early 1950s that the government either misused or misunderstood modern science and technology. They urged Eisenhower to appoint a single high-level presidential science advisor, “a person he could live with easily,” to help him make decisions involving technology. The launch ofSputnik IIjust a month after the firstSputnikincreased the pressure. The first satellite, a 184-pound object the size of a basketball, was bad enough. Its fellow traveler weighed in at half a ton and was nearly the size of a Volkswagen Bug.

  A few days after the news of Sputnik II,Eisenhower told the nation that he found his man for science in James R. Killian Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Killian was a nonscientist who spoke effectively on behalf of science. On November 7, 1957, in the first of several addresses to reassure the American people and reduce panic, the president announced Killian’s appointment as science advisor. It came late in the address but made front-page news the following day. The president had drawn links between science and defense, and said Killian would “follow through on the scientific improvement of our defense.” The press dubbed Killian America’s “Missile Czar.”

  During the October 15 meeting with his science advisors, the president had spoken of his concern over the management of research in government. “With great enthusiasm and determination the president wanted the scientists to tell him where scientific research belonged in the structure of the federal government,” said Sherman Adams, the president’s executive assistant. In addition, Eisenhower told them he had a fine man in Secretary of Defense McElroy and urged the scientists to meet with the new secretary, which they did that very day.