Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Q-32 computer, a military mainframe computer in Santa Monica, California.
The person in charge of the project was Larry Roberts, an MIT PhD in electri-
cal engineering who, like many others before him, had migrated up the road
to the Lincoln Lab. The report on the networking experiment had concluded
that although the connection had been successfully established, its reliabil-
ity and response time to commands were, as later described by Roberts, “just
plain lousy.” Roberts, with his deep technical knowledge of the problem, was
the ideal candidate for the job but, unfortunately for Taylor, Roberts had no
interest in leaving Lincoln Lab (
Fig. 10.11
) to become what he called “just a
bureaucrat.” In late 1966, nearly a year after he had received the funding for
the project, Taylor persuaded ARPA Director Herzfeld to call the director of
Lincoln Lab and tell him about ARPA's problem and, at the same time, point
out that more than 50 percent of the lab's research funding came from ARPA.
Roberts accepted the job two weeks later.
When Roberts took over the ARPANET project in late 1966, he saw that he
had three major technical challenges to solve, as well as a surprising “socio-
logical” problem involving human behavior and social relationships. The first
challenge was how to physically connect all the time-sharing computers at the
different sites. In the experiment between Lincoln Lab and Santa Monica, Roberts
had shown that a direct telephone line connection between the two comput-
ers could work. The problem was that ARPA had funded more than a dozen
major time-sharing computers, and to establish direct connections between all
these computers would require more than sixty-five long-distance telephone
lines, a number that would rapidly increase and become very expensive as the
number of computer systems increased. His second challenge was that even
if he had these long-distance lines, how could they most efficiently be used?
In their topic
Computer: A History of the Information Machine
, Martin Campbell-
Kelly and William Aspray state that: “Experience with commercial time-shar-
ing systems had shown that less than 2% of the communications capacity of a
telephone line was productively used because most of a user's time was spent
thinking, during which the line was idle.”
15
The last technical problem that
Roberts needed to solve was how all the different incompatible computer sys-
tems would communicate with one another without each site having to write
many different software interfaces. Although unknown to Roberts at this time,
Fig. 10.11. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory was
established in 1951 to build the nation's
first air defense system. However, its
roots date back to the MIT Radiation
Laboratory, which was formed out of the
Physics Department during World War II
to develop radar for the Allied war effort.
B.10.10. Bob Taylor graduated in 1958 from University of Texas with a degree in psychology and
mathematics. In 1965, at the age of thirty-four, he became director of the Information Processing
Techniques Office at ARPA. In this role he was responsible for creating the program that led to
the creation of the ARPANET. After leaving ARPA, he went on to be the founding director of the
Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox's new PARC. It was at PARC where many of the pioneering
computing technologies that we see around us today were invented, guided by Taylor's leader-
ship. See
Chapter 8
for a more detailed discussion.
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