Eisenhower hadn't wanted a
seasoned military expert heading the Pentagon. The president
distrusted the military-industrial complex and the fiefdoms of the
armed services. his attitude toward them sometimes bordered on
contempt. (p. 15)
With the exception of a few supporters
at Bell Laboratories who understood digital technology, AT & T
continued to resist the idea [of slicing data into message blocks and
sending them to find their way through a matrix of phone lines]. The
most outspoken skeptics were some of AT & T's most senior
technical people. "After I heard the refrain 'bullshit' often
enough", Baran recalled, "I was motivated to go away and write a
series of memoranda papers to show, for example, that algorithms were
possible that allowed a short message to contain all the information
it needed to find its way through the network". With each objection
answered another was raised and another piece of a report had to be
written. By the time Baran had answered all the concerns raised by
the defense, communications, and compute science communities, nearly
four years had passed and his volumes numbered eleven. (p.
63)
Ornstein was an outspoken opponent of
the Vietnam war. By 1969 a lot of people who had never questioned
their own involvement in Pentagon-sponsored research projects began
having second thoughts. Ornstein had taken to wearing a lapel pin
that said RESIST. The pin also bore the [Omega] sign, for electrical
resistance, a popular anti war symbol for electrical engineers. One
day, before a Pentagon briefing, Ornstein conceived a new use for his
pin. In meetings at the Pentagon, it wasn't unusual for the men
around the table to remove their jackets and roll up their shirt
sleeves. Ornstein told Heart [a colleague] that he was going to pin
his RESIST button onto a General's jacket when no one was looking ...
Ornstein didn't, but he did wear his pin to the meeting. (p.
113)
The engineers at BBN relished
opportunities to spook the telephone company repair people with their
ability to detect, and eventually predict, line trouble from afar. By
examining the data, BBN could sometimes predict that a line was about
to go down. The phone company's repair offices had never heard of
such a thing and didn't take to it well. When BBN loopback tests
determined there was trouble on a line, say, between Menlo Park
(Stanford) and Santa Barbara, one of Heart's engineers in Cambridge
picked up the phone and called Pacific Bell. "You're having trouble
with your line between Menlo Park and Santa Barbara", he'd say. "Are
you calling from Menlo Park or Santa Barbara?", the Pacific Bell
technician would ask. "I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts". "Yeah,
right". Eventually, when BBN's calls proved absolutely correct, the
telephone company began to send repair teams out to find whatever
trouble BBN had spotted. (p. 163)
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 ... 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 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." He had no idea he was
creating an icon for the wired world. (p. 192)
A frequent flier,
Lucasi seldom boarded a plane without lugging 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," Lucasik 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. (p. 193)
By the end of 1973,
Cerf and Kahn had completed their paper, "A Protocol for Packet
Network Intercommunication." They flipped a coin to determine whose
name should appear first, and Cerf won the toss. The paper appeared
in a widely read engineering journal the following spring. (p.
226)
Taylor arrived late
[to the BBN anniversary party], but not too late to engage in
something of a dust up with Bob Kahn, who warned the AP reporter to
be certain to distinguish between the early days of the ARPANET and
the Internet, and that it was the invention of TCP/IP that marked the
true beginnings of internetworking. Not true, said Taylor. The
Internet's roots most certainly lay with the ARPANET. The group
around the telephone grew uncomfortable. "How about women?" asked the
reporter, perhaps to break the silence. "Are there any female
pioneers?" More silence. (p. 263)
A
must visit site: The companion
web site to Where Wizards Stay Up
Late
This site grew from an
embarrassment of riches. In the course of researching the book, we
found ourselves in possession of dozens of diagrams, hand-drawn
sketches and maps, photographs and technical papers--the original
work of the earliest network pioneers. But we were able to put just a
fraction of it all into the book. And while the book may be the
perfect medium for telling a good story, the Web is the perfect venue
for much of the primary source material behind
it......
Read Ann Online's interview
with Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon about Where
Wizards Stay up Late and their
writing lives in general.
Read Amazon.com's interview
with Katie Hafner.
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