IS THERE A FATHER OF THE INTERNET?
A discussion of the main contenders........
Contents
Introduction - self styled 'fathers' assert their claims.
Internet defined - the FNC paper.
A graphical view of the development of the Internet.
The Principal Contenders to Paternity:
JCR Licklider - Bob Taylor - Paul Baran - Donald Davies - Lawrence Roberts
Conclusion - a possible contender.
'The Multiple paternity claims to the Internet (not only had each man been there at the start but each had made a contribution that he considered immeasurable) ...Kahn, Heart, Englebart, and Kleinrock came out most noticeably that afternoon during a group interview with the AP reporter....Taylor arrived late ....it was the invention of TCP/IP that marked the true beginnings of internetworking....[Kahn asserted]...not true said Taylor - the Internet's roots most certainly lay with the ARPANET....'How about women'....asked the reporter, perhaps to break the silence..." (Hafner & Lyon: Where Wizards Stay up Late, at p.263). Despite these claims how many of those illustrious scientists should feature in the Internet Paternity Stakes is a very debatable question.
Fatherhood implies a seminal contribution. A contribution without which the respective germinative seeds cannot coalesce into an embryonic structure. From an embryo grows the adult whole, nurtured by its wider family.
So far so good, but can the 'Internet' be defined, and can it's embryonic history be determined? A definition of the Internet has been given by the The Federal Networking Council (FNC):
"Internet" refers to the global information system that --
(i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons;
(ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and
(iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein."
If this definition is accepted for present discussion purposes, it appears that it was the development of the TCP/IP protocol that was the seminal contribution. This is a reference to the work of Bob Kahn and Vinton (Vint) Cerf who in 1973 formulated the original protocols that would enable information to be routed around disparate networks of computers, principally ARPANET. (Advanced Research Projects Agency). However to speak of protocols presupposes the existence of at least one or more networks of computers and at least an adolescent Internet - part way through its development - to the agglomeration of global networks of today. To trace the fatherhood of the Internet, if that is to be possible, requires a search for the fundamental origins of the Internet.
Fatherhood, by definition, excludes those whose ideas, though central to future developments, did not make that tangible contribution, implicit in paternity, to the inter-networking of computers. It is helpful to view such development graphically:
The Historical Development of the Internet over Time
This timeline is provided by the Internet Society and shows that the earliest practical research centred around the ARPANET in the late 60s and early 70s. The key players in this early part of the story were JCR. Licklider, Robert Taylor, Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts. (Module 3 Section 2.1). Is it therefore amongst this fraternity that an affiliation suit can be conclusively determined? Each contender will be considered in turn.
JCR Licklider - (photo courtesy: pbs.org)
Licklider was the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office between 1962 and 65. The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by him in August of 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He imagined a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. His contribution therefore was to set in motion a train of intellectual thinking whilst being in a position of considerable practical influence. Hafner and Lyon describe this work as 'some of the most daring and imaginative thinking of the day' (Wizards, p.35). Clearly a possible contender.
Robert Taylor (photo courtesy: pbs.org)
More usually known as Bob Taylor was Director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office between 1965 and 69. He was the founder and associate manager of Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 until 1977. In 1963 he had been invited to join an unofficial committe of US Government program managers. He came into computers from his discipline of psychoacoustics. Hafner and Lyon describe him as 'a far sighted program officer, who had a knack for picking innovative winners - both projects and researchers. (Wizards p.40). Most significantly he acted upon an idea of Licklider's and secured funding for the initial networking experiments. Computers were then formidably expensive - so was it possible to link them together and enhance their capacities, and share these scarce resources across the country. A formidable contender in the Paternity Stakes.
Paul Baran (photo courtesy: church.computer.org)
Paul Baran was an immigrant from Eastern Europe who joined the
RAND Corporation in in 1959. This was at the height
of the Cold war - paranoia concerning a possible Eastern Block attack on
the West was rampant. RAND, inter alia, was concerned with developing
communications systems that would survive a nuclear attack. The main constituent
of such systems is a high level of redundancy. Traditional communications
systems such as the telephone used centralized networks
-
diagram (A), where the various (then analogue) telephone lines fed into a
central switching base. Destroy that base and you destroy the network of
communications. A variation on the Centralized network is shown by Diagram
(B). This has a variety of nerve centres, but take out the connecting links,
or a crucial nerve centre and the network is in trouble. Paul Baran's seminal
contribution was to devised the Distributed Network - Diagram C. Here numerous
nodes have several connections to other nodes. This is a reproduction of
his original diagram. Baran's work demonstrated that provided each node
has at least preferably four connections to other nodes an 'exceptionally
high level of ruggedness and reliability' would pertain (Wizards, p.59).
Baran's contribution however did not end with devising Distributed Networks. In pursuit of reliability and indestrucibility he counselled subdividing each message into small chunks. These chunks - later to be called packets by Donald Watts Davies who was coincidentally working along similar lines in the UK - could follow whatever route was available to them, and ,suitably electronically labelled, they would be re-assembled by the receiving computer into a coherent whole. The system also had the advantage of maximising the use of the conducting media.
These two concepts are central to the working of the internet and must rate very high in the Paternity Stakes.
Donald
Davies
who
died
on the 31st May 2000 (Times Obituary) has already been mentioned. In
an article for The Guardian newspaper in 1997, Davies said he had realized
that it was inefficient for a computer to send an entire file to another
computer in an uninterrupted stream of data, "chiefly because computer traffic
is 'bursty' with long periods of silence.'' "So, in November 1965,
I conceived the use of a purpose-designed network employing packet switching
in which the stream of bits is broken up into short messages, or 'packets,'
that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled
into the original stream,''
(Internet Society
Obituary).As The Times Obituary puts it: 'His network design was received
enthusiastically by America's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), and
the Arpanet and the NPL local network became the first two computer networks
in the world using the technique. Today's Internet can be traced back directly
to this origin.' Davies is thus another very serious contender for the title
of Father of the Internet.
(Copyright The Times 31 MAY 2000)
Lawrence Roberts (photo courtesy: pbs.org)
The remaining
contender
of
the five men offered as candidates is Lawrence (Larry) Roberts - Director
of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from
1969 to 1973, and CEO of Telenet, the first packet switching utility. A
phenomenal workaholic at ARPA in first day he
determined the layout of the Pentagon's labrynthine computer network structure.
His work was to be structured around the problems of connecting dissimilar
matrixes, a feature now taken as commonplace on the Internet, where
users quite happily dive in and out of disparate systems unaware of the technical
problems that have been scaled. It was Roberts who drafted and set out the
proposals for the construction the Interface Message Processor - IMP - in
1968 - the key linking computer that would handle and route messages across
the networks. A process today so taken for granted, nut in its time wholly
revolutionary; a final and significant contender in the Paternity stakes.
In many ways the creation of the Internet arose from the fortuitous combination and fusion of a number of remarkable intellects and in most respects was spawned by their collaborative effort. On the other hand, if one individual can be singled out as 'Father of the Internet' then perhaps the accolade should go to Paul Baran, whose innovative Distributive networks and packet switching, lie at the heart of the present day Internet.
Protocol: The computer labelling of a message or packet which controls its transmission processes across a network.
ARPA was a special agency within the US Department of Defense set up to fund and foster advanced research in a number of areas, including computing. In 1966 the Agency decided to construct an experimental wide-area network which would link ARPA-funded research laboratories across the United States. The ARPANET was designed and built between 1967 and 1972. ARPANET was a single, monolithic network. The Internet as we know it today evolved from the ARPANET. The drive behind the 'internetting' project (which was also funded by ARPA) was to find a way of linking different networks together into a 'network of networks'. This took from 1973 until about 1983. (Module 3)
The ideas which led to the Internet, or which inspired the individuals who conceived and built the system. These mainly stemmed from one institution - the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - and a group of extraordinary scientists and engineers who worked there. These included: Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon and JCR Licklider.
RAND RAND (Research ANd Development) was created at the urging of its original client, the US Air Force (then the Army Air Forces). From its inception in the days following World War II, RAND has focused on the US nation's most pressing policy problems. High-quality, objective research on national security became the institution's first hallmark. Web Site