HOÀNG-ÂN: Of Soap and the Internet
In 1989, Danny Cohen, a contributor in building the Internet, said in a speech, "In the beginning ARPA created the ARPANET. And the ARPANET was without form and void. And darkness was upon the deep. And the Spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network. And ARPA said, 'let there be a protocol' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good. And ARPA said 'let there be more networks.' And it was." *
ARPA or Advance Research Project Agency was founded by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 during the United States national crisis following the launching of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union in October 1957. It was conceived by Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy. McElroy gave birth to soap opera to sell soap on radio and television when he was a promotion manager at P&G. He was known to have said, "The problem of improving literary taste is one for the school. Soap opera sells lots of soap." The ARPA was directed by the Secretary of Defense to prevent competition among the branches of the military for programs and budgets in Research and Development (R&D).
Ray Johnson, ARPA's first director left an annual $160,000 job with General Electric to head ARPA for $18,000. He defined ARPA's mission as "outlining such space projects as global surveillance satellites, space defense interception vehicles, strategic orbital weapon systems, stationary communication satellites, manned space station, and a moonbase." *
However, in 1958, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) was enacted into law and the ARPA's mission was changed. It mainly concerned with technical research and attracted "hard charging" scientists, mostly from universities and research laboratories. These scientists aimed to change ARPA "into a community of the best technical scientific minds in America." And the enthusiasm was heightened with President John F. Kennedy proclaiming that science is the new frontier.
The relationship between the military and the computer establishments began with the modern computer industry itself. During World War II the military funded for development of faster calculating machine. The Navy funded Hower Eiken to build the Mark I, a 51-ft long, 8-ft tall switchboard. The Army funded the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator & Calculator). The first ray of the dawn in computer as a common commodity for ordinary citizens were the first minicomputer that interact directly with the user and the concept of time-sharing.
The fears of a Russian attack in the 1950s gave rise to project Charles proposed by scientists to the Air Force to form a research team to create the technology for defense against aerial attack. They formed Lincoln Laboratory to develop "Distant Early Warning Line (DEW) an arrays of radar stretching ideally from Hawaii to Alaska, across Canadian archipelago to Greenland, Iceland, and the British Isles. Also the SAGEL (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project for communication, control, and analysis to aid such "an extended complex structure of defense."*
SAGEL inspired psychologist J. C. R. Lichlider, ARPA's director to view computing from a totally new perspective and he wrote his paper, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" in which he elaborated his idea for the machine as an extended part of the human and his partner in the problem-solving process. When Wesley Clark introduced Licklider to the TX-2 computing machine, the state of the art in digital computation, Licklider was hooked on the vision of a direct interactive between man and computer.
In 1965, Tom Marill proposed to ARPA to fund his company Computer Cooperation of America (CCA) to conduct a networking experiment to connect the TX-2 of Lincoln Company to the SDC Q-32 in Santa Monica to enable the two computers to send message to each other. Marill grouped characters into messages, sent them across the link. He called the set of procedure for sending information back and forth as "protocol."
When Paul Banan and Donald Davies independently worked on the idea of "package switch" as an analogy of moving companies taking apart a whole structure into manageable parts, moving them across a distance and reassembling them at the new site, the idea for the Internet began to germinate. Banan came up with the "hot potato round" a rapid store and forward system working almost instantaneously instead of the old post-it-and-forward teletype procedure.
ARPA's next director Larry Robert wanted to connect all of time-sharing computers to one another directly over dial-up phone lines. This networking function would be handled by the "host" computers at each site. Wesley Clark proposed to insert a small computer between each host a subnetwork with small, identical nodes, all interconnected as the network transmission lines. The network started at four sites: UCLA, SRI, University of Utah, and University of California at Santa Barbara. Dave Elan of Utah worked on how to manipulate the network to transmit more than just textual exchange.
ARPA awarded the bid to the firm Bolt Benarek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusett to build the Interface Message Processor (IMP) with Frank Heast the designer and builder. With an invisible subnet IMPs would work like a telephone line connecting automatically without a human operator.
Such was how the Internet was formed.
January 22nd, 2007--President George Bush's State of Union Address
* "Where Wizards Stay Up Late--The Origin of the Internet," Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
