SPEAKER_03: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_02: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_00: Bob Taylor worked at the heart of the Pentagon, third floor, near the Secretary of Defence and near too to the boss of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA had been founded early in 1958, but then NASA had largely supplanted it. Aviation Week magazine dismissed ARPA, a dead cat hanging in the fruit closet. Nevertheless, ARPA muddled on and in 1966, Bob Taylor and ARPA were about to plant the seed of something big. Next to Taylor's office was the terminal room, a pokey little space where three remote access terminals with their three different keyboards sat side by side. Each allowed Taylor to issue commands to a faraway mainframe computer, one at the University of California in Berkeley on the other side of the continent, one at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, more than 700 kilometres up the coast, and a strategic air command mainframe in Santa Monica, the ANFSQ32XD1A, or Q32 for short. Each of these massive computers required a different login procedure and programming language. It was, as the historians Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon put it, like having a den cluttered with several television sets, each dedicated to a different channel. Although Taylor could access these computers remotely through his terminals, they couldn't easily connect to each other. Nor could other ARPA funded computers across the United States. Sharing data, dividing up a complex calculation, or even sending a message between these computers was all but impossible. The next step was obvious, said Taylor. We ought to find a way to connect all these different machines. Taylor talked to ARPA's boss, Charlie Hertzfeld, about his goal. We already know how to do it, he declared, although it was not so clear that anyone really did know how to connect together a nationwide network of mainframe computers. Great idea, said Hertzfeld. Get it going. You've got a million dollars more on your budget right now. Go. The meeting had taken 20 minutes, and Bob Taylor had better figure out how to fix the problem. Lawrence Roberts of MIT had already managed to get one of his mainframes sharing data with the Q32 over at Air Command in Santa Monica, two supercomputers chatting on the phone. It had been slow, fragile, and fussy. Bob Taylor, Lawrence Roberts, and their fellow networking visionaries had something much more ambitious in mind, a network to which any computer could connect. As Roberts put it at the time, almost every conceivable item of computer hardware and software will be in the network. That was an enormous opportunity. It was also a formidable challenge. Computers were rare, expensive, and puny by modern standards. They were typically programmed by hand by the researchers who used them. Who would persuade these privileged few to set aside their projects to write code in the service of someone else's data sharing project? It was like asking a Ferrari owner to idle the engine in order to heat up a fillet steak before feeding it to someone else's dog. The solution was proposed by another computing pioneer, the physicist Wesley Clark. Clark had been following the emergence of a new breed of computer, the minicomputer, modest and inexpensive compared to the room-sized mainframes installed in universities across the United States. Clark suggested installing a minicomputer at every site on this new network. The local mainframe say that hulking Q32 in Santa Monica would talk to the minicomputer sitting close beside it. The minicomputer would then take responsibility for talking to all the other minicomputers on the network, and for the new and interesting problem of moving packets of data reliably around the network until they reached their destination. All the minicomputers would run in the same way, and if you wrote a networking program for one of them, it would work on them all. Adam Smith, the father of economics, would have been proud of the way that Clark was taking advantage of specialization and the division of labor, perhaps Adam Smith's biggest idea. The existing mainframes would keep on doing what they already did well. The new minicomputers would be optimized to reliably handle the networking without breaking down, and it surely didn't hurt that ARPA could simply pay for them all. In one episode of the office comedy The IT Crowd, the geek heroes convinced their technologically clueless boss, Jen, that they have the internet. It's a small box with a winking light. They offer to lend it to her, as long as she promises not to break it. The beauty of Wesley Clark's idea was that, as far as any particular computer was concerned, this was pretty much how the network would appear. Each local mainframe had to be programmed merely to talk to the little black box beside it, the local minicomputer. If you could do that, you could talk to the entire network that stood behind it. The little black boxes were actually large and battleship grey. They were called Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPs were customised from Honeywell minicomputers that were the size of refrigerators and weighed more than 400kg apiece. They cost $80,000 each, more than half a million dollars in today's money. The network designers wanted message processors that would sit quietly with minimal supervision and just keep on working, come heat or cold, vibration or power surge, mildew, mice or, most dangerous of all, curious graduate students with screwdrivers. Military grade Honeywell computers seemed like the ideal starting point, although their armour plating may have been overkill. The prototype IMP0 emerged early in 1969. It didn't work. A young engineer spent months manually unwrapping and re-wrapping wires on pins about a millimetre apart. It wasn't until October that year that IMP1 and IMP2 were in position at UCLA in Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute over 500km up the coast. On October 29, 1969, two mainframe computers exchanged their first word through their companion IMPs. It was, biblically enough, low. The operator had been trying to type LOGIN and the network had collapsed after two letters. A stuttering start. But the ARPANET had been switched on. Other networks followed and then a decade-long project to interconnect these into a network of networks, or simply, the internet. Eventually the IMPs were supplanted by more modern devices called routers. By the late 1980s, they were museum pieces. But the world that Lawrence Roberts had predicted, in which every conceivable item of computer, hardware and software will be in the network, was becoming reality. And the IMPs had shown the way.
SPEAKER_02: The definitive history of the early internet is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Heffner and Matthew Lyon. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_04: We have two women from different countries who have a shared experience, passion or profession. It was a wonderful, hedonistic lifestyle. I loved solving math questions. I'm Kim Chaganeta and I'm the host of The Conversation from the BBC World Service. Working in a hospital has been my dream. Oh, you're roadie, you know, it's like you must be smelly and dirty.
SPEAKER_02: You're always surprised by some of the stuff that comes up. They'll say something and it's,
SPEAKER_04: Oh, is that the same for you there in this country? Did it spur you on Rose? Because in a way you've got nothing to lose. Exactly, exactly. What I really enjoy is finding out how eager the guests are to speak to each other. I think this is so important to meet other women and feel inspired by them. You're already my role model right now, Rebecca.
SPEAKER_04: It's amazing to be able to hear these stories, to hear about their successes and to hear about their struggles. I didn't want to be just like one story that everybody's talking about because they are shocked.
SPEAKER_03: And to leave the room feeling completely inspired.
SPEAKER_04: There's nothing that you can't do in this world if you set your mind to it. That's The Conversation from the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
