Book Proposal On the International Origins of the Internet: A Conceptual History by Ronda Hauben rh120@columbia.edu Table of Contents Introduction: The development of the Internet offers a prototype of a multinational collaborative research project which fosters communication across the boundaries of diverse administrative structures, political entities, and technical designs. The myth surrounding the origins of the Internet is that it began as a military project in 1969 in the US. 1969 is the date marking the origins of the ARPANET (a US packet switching network), but not the birth of the Internet. The origins of the Internet date from 1973. The goal of the researchers creating the Internet was to create a network of networks, a means for networks from diverse countries to intercommunicate. The development of tcp/ip, the protocol that makes the Internet a reality, was international from its very beginnings. This book will document the international origins of the internet and the collaboration among early Internet researchers. The book will also document the collaborative communication processes that preceeded and informed the early development of the Internet. To understand the conditions that nurtured the birth and early development of the Internet, it is important to understand the creation and development of the Information Processing Techniques Office created by J.C.R. Licklider in 1962. The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) provided a protective institutional form to nurture the earliest development of the Internet. The introduction will discuss why it is helpful to understand the origins of the IPTO and of its parent agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA/IPTO made it possible to support, nourish and give leadership to the development of computer science. Such research has created a paradigm change in the use of computers, from batch processing and stand alone computer use to interactive computing and computer networking. This paradigm shift is having a profound impact on the world. When such technological and scientific changes have been created, it is important to understand the conditions that nourished their birth and gestation. Yet very little is known about the situation and people involved in early Internet development. The purpose of this book is to explore how the Internet developed and how the researchers who were part of the Internet's development were supported in their work to accomplish such significant innovative development. Chapter 1 - The science of information, communication and control - the early post World War II interdisciplinary circles of engineers and scientists create a fertile ground. This chapter will look back at the early post World War II exploration of what at first was called "feedback", later information and communication science, and then "cybernetics". The chapter will consider the conferences in the U.S. and Great Britain of engineers and scientists interested in the newly emerging science of information, communication and control. J.C.R. Licklider was a participant in these circles in the US and Great Britain. The 1954 conference on Information, Communication and Control held at MIT continued the tradition of the five Macy conferences on Cybernetics publications. A transcription of the 1954 conference by Licklider was in the tradition of the 10 Macy conferences (1946-1953). This 1954 conference is a link between the Macy conferences on Cybernetics and Licklider's visionary administration of the IPTO. Chapter 2 - The Information Processing Techniques Office and the Birth of the Internet: A Study in Governance In both "Man-Computer Symbiosis"(1960) by JCR Licklider, and "On-Line Man-Computer Communication"(1962) by Licklider and Wenden E. Clark, there is the notion of the capability of the human mind to do aspects of problem solving and decision making that then were not within the capability of the computer. In "Man-Computer Symbiosis", Licklider characterizes the human as goal seeking. In his paper with Clark, they refer to the need for "a tight on-line coupling between human brains and electronic computers." Their objective is to "amalgamate the predominantly human capabilities and the predominantly computer capabilities to create an integrated system for goal-oriented on-line-inventive information processing." Understanding why and how Licklider and then Licklider and Clark use terms like "goal seeking" or "goal-oriented" is helpful to understand the nature of the computer and networking developments that Licklider initiated during his leadership of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA. In 1962 Licklider was invited to ARPA to create the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). In a recent study describing the (IPTO) by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science, the authors of the study write: The entire system displayed something of a self-organizing, self-managing system. Funding a Revolution, 1999 This chapter will explore the IPTO as a "self-organizing" and "self-managing" system. It will examine the connection between this description of IPTO and the concepts of "feedback" and "servo-mechanisms" that were being studied in the early post WWII period by the research communities that Licklider was connected with before he joined ARPA to create the IPTO. By examining this connection, a basis will be set to understand the context both of Licklider's early writing and of the foundation he set for the creation and development of IPTO as the institutional form that made possible the development of the Internet. Chapter 3 - Creating ARPA as the Needed Interface This chapter explores the question: How did an institution like IPTO evolve within the U.S. government? A related question is why the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) could at times function as a home for important scientific and technical innovation. Also, at times the interface broke down. To understand the contradictory nature of the interface between the US Dept of Defense and the scientific research community, it is helpful to explore how and why the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created within the DoD. The experience of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) created by Vannevar Bush during WWII is summarized in Bush's report to President Roosevelt "Science: The Endless Frontier" In this report, Bush sets out a number of ground rules for the effective creation of an interface between the U.S. government and the scientific community. How do these ground rules help to clarify the environment needed to support basic research in science and technology? What kind of environment was created for scientists by the DoD in ARPA and then in the office created at ARPA for research in information processing, i.e. the Information Processing Techniques Office? This chapter describes efforts by the U.S. government to define the kind of interface needed for certain kinds of scientific and technical research and how such research was then supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. Chapter 4 - Basic Research for the National Defense and the U.S. Department of Defense: A Paradox? After WWII the question was raised of the appropriate form for a research organization to spearhead research for the national defense. This involved support for basic research in fields that might benefit the U.S. Department of Defense. An early proposal was to put such research into a private organization outside of the U.S. government. But there were objections raised that it was not appropriate to put such government functions outside of the U.S. government. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) was created by the U.S. Congress to support research of interest to the Navy. There were also efforts within the Army and Air Force to support the creation of the appropriate research organizations. This chapter describes these efforts and the tension that developed between the need of the armed services for basic research and the pressure for applied research. The experience of ONR and the Air Force Office of Science Research (AFOSR) with the tension of how to support basic research given the pressure for applied research is explored. A similar problem would eventually confront IPTO. Chapter 5 - IPTO Centers of Excellence and Creating a Resource Sharing Network After coming to ARPA in 1962, Licklider sets out to create centers of excellence for computer science research. He initiated the creation of Project MAC at MIT as the first center of excellence. He initiates a center at Carnegie Mellon University. Under his leadership of IPTO, several other centers of excellence are created. Though it is too early to begin computer networking research, Licklider promotes a vision of an intergalactic network which inspires those who later take over the leadership of the IPTO, like Larry Roberts. Those who follow Licklider at IPTO take on the challenge of creating the new technology of packet switching to create a resource sharing network for ARPA researchers Also Licklider establishes a tradition of the wide dissemination of the research of the IPT community. This leads to collaboration among researchers in Great Britain at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) under the leadership of Donald Davies with the information processing technical community. This collaboration will contribute to the early development of the ARPANET, a packet switching network sponsored by the IPTO. Researchers who work on early ARPANET research recognize the significant impact IPTO computer communication research will have on the world. Chapter 6 - Developing the New Field of Computer Communications A public demonstration of the ARPANET is planned for the first International Computer Communications Conference (ICCC'72) in Washington, D.C. Over a thousand researchers from around the world attend this conference and personally experience the power of packet switching technology. Researchers at the conference question who can take on the challenge that the merger of computer and communications technological advances will pose to the world. They anticipate the important changes these new developments will bring. As researchers in different countries begin to create packet switching networks to meet their local and national needs, the question of how to link up dissimilar packet switching networks becomes a research problem to be solved. This problem is identified by Robert Kahn who organized the ICCC'72 demonstration as the Multiple Network Problem. Chapter 7 - The Birth of the Internet: An Architectural Conception to Solve the Multiple Network Problem Robert Kahn, a researcher at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) responsible for the system design of the ARPANET, goes to work at IPTO in October 1972 after the successful ICCC'72 demonstration. He initiates a program to create a mobile ground packet switching network based on radio broadcast technology. Also he takes on responsibility for an existing initiative to create a satellite based packet switching network. The challenge of making it possible to link these two dissimilar networks with the ARPANET is a technical and scientific challenge. Kahn recognizes that this will require a new architecture and the design of a new protocol to embody the new architecture. This chapter describes how communication science presents a model that is helpful in solving this problem. The conception of an open architecture networking environment will make it possible to solve the Multiple Network Problem. Chapter 8 - Designing the Internetworking Protocol TCP/IP Creating SATNET and PRNET and linking them with the ARPANET At the ICCC '72 demonstration researchers from around the world formed the International Network Working Group (INWG) to share their research efforts creating packet switching networks. Steve Crocker at IPTO funded Vinton Cerf to head the INWG. Cerf had just gotten his PhD at UCLA and joined the Stanford University faculty. Kahn invited Cerf to collaborate with him on the design for a protocol to embody the open architecture conception. The chapter will describe the details of creating the design for the protocol that has become known as the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). And it will describe the technical aspects of the design. The details of the TCP protocol implementation were not to be developed in the isolation of a laboratory. To the contrary, they were born in collaborative research among IPTO researchers from the US and researchers from Great Britain and Norway. Linking Europe and the US via a packet communications network presented the challenge of creating a packet satellite network (SATNET). SATNET was created for the INTELSAT IV satellite, to link computer sites at the British University College of London (UCL), Norwegian (NORSAR), and the US ARPANET. Research creating TCP/IP also involved developing a mobile packet radio network (PRNET). This chapter will describe the process of creating SATNET and how it provided the research environment to create the early specification and implementation for the TCP/IP protocol. This chapter will describe how the technical collaboration between IPTO and UCL researchers overcame the political barriers they faced. Chapter 9 - IPTO as the Center of the IPT Community, the Pressures on the IPTO, and their Efforts to Protect the IPT Community: Turning Basic Research into Applied Research? What was it like working in the IPT office? This chapter will present observations and descriptions from the program managers and directors of the office about how the office gave them an important vantage point from which to support researchers in the IPT community. Also the chapter will describe the observations from those in the IPT community about their interactions with the IPTO. The IPTO staff were able to support researchers because of their government position. This experience provides a case study to learn how an institutional form within government, for a time, was able to support scientific and technological research. By 1974, changes initiated by the US Congress began to affect IPTO. Most importantly, there was a change in the institutional placement of ARPA. ARPA was originally created as part of the Office of the US Secretary of Defense (OSD) and under its protection. Soon after it was created there were some changes in its reporting status, but it retained OSD protection. By the early 1970's, however, ARPA had an administrative change and lost the protection of the Secretary of Defense. The Barber Report, probably the only institutional history of ARPA, was written as ARPA was being transferred to a different administrative form and placement. ARPA was ended and many of its functions transferred to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). These changes in administrative form were accompanied by changes in the kind of research that IPTO was pressured to do. There was increased pressure for applied research in place of support for basic research. Continuing effort to support basic research required protective camouflage similar to what had happened with ONR and AFOSR. Similarly, this pressure had a serious effect on the IPT community just as it had with AFOSR and ONR. The growing pressure to do research related to weapons development at IPTO put the research organization into an increasingly vulnerable situation as had happened with ONR. The political importance of such developments on the armed services and their contractors was reflected in the IPTO experience with the Strategic Computing Initiative. This all left IPTO very vulnerable. Chapter 10 - TCP digest: Creating the Cutover to TCP and the early Internet - Even the DoD is not easily won to TCP/IP The US Department of Defense was faced with a problem. Western Union had won the contract for providing a network for the DoD. They had installed Autodin II, a packet switching network using problemmatic technology. It was becoming increasingly evident at the DoD that there was a need for alternatives to Autodin II. Steve Walker at the DoD was asked to propose an alternative. He presented the case for the adoption of TCP/IP by the DoD. The chapter will describe the case made for the adoption of TCP/IP and how TCP was chosen to replace Autodin II. The contract for Autodin II was ended and efforts initiated to adopt TCP/IP as the DoD protocol. This chapter thus helps to explore the issue of why basic research is important as a foundation for needed applied research developments, and why basic research needs to be protected if applied research developments are desired. The decision to adopt TCP/IP by the US Department of Defense in March 1982 meant that a schedule was set for the cutover from the ARPANET protocol NCP to TCP/IP on ARPANET computers. A mailing list, the TCP Digest, was created and helped to set the basis for the cutover from NCP to TCP/IP. The deadline for the cutover meant that there was a need to explore the problems that the cutover would entail. The cutover to TCP/IP set the basis to split the ARPANET into the ARPANET for research and MILNET for operational DoD traffic. Communication was possible between these two different networks via TCP/IP. Chapter 11 - Unix is spread thru the International Technical Community, especially in Europe. IPTO supported the creation of a version of UNIX that could be freely distributed to the technical research community. This version of UNIX was called the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD). In the early 1980's IPTO supported the creation of an implementation of the TCP/IP protocol to be distributed as part of BSD. The version was originally created by researchers at BBN and then modified by Bill Joy at the University of California Berkeley for BSD. Also IPTO supported the design and fabrication of computer chips as part of a program called Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), and the creation of a workstation using chips designed as part of this program. This led to the development of the SUN workstation. The manufacture of SUN workstations was transitioned to the private sector and the workstations were widely used by the research community. TCP/IP was part of the BSD UNIX distribution. This helped to spread TCP/IP among the academic and research community both within the U.S. and abroad, as in Europe. Chapter 12 - The Vision of Computer Networking Spreads in Europe, even in Eastern Europe This chapter will explore the role played by another institution, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and a technical association, the IFIP, TC 6.0 working group, in helping to spread the vision of networking and the knowledge of Unix in Europe, even in Eastern Europe. Chapter 13 - Spreading the Net and networking and the Emergence of the Netizen - the role of mailing lists and newsgroups in building the Internet In Europe, several national networks were developed in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, the Internet spread in a number of countries around the world. Also Usenet helped to spread computer networking in Europe. Also by the early 1990s the concept of the netizen emerged online as a new form of global citizenship. The chapter will provide some examples of networks that developed in the 1980s and how these linked up in the 1990s using TCP/IP. Also certain coordinating structures that were more formal functioned and helped to provide needed management forms. The chapter will explore these formal and informal forms that helped make the Internet the worldwide network that developed by the 1990s. The chapter will also focus on the role that communication among the researchers and among researchers and users played in the development of the Internet. It will look at MsgGroup Mailing List, and several other mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups to consider how communication and feedback made it possible to create the Internet and to focus on the needs of the networks users in developing the Internet. The chapter will also consider the problem of the future management of the Internet's infrastructure. Chapter 14 - The End of the IPTO and the Legacy - What are the implications toward the future of the Internet? In 1986, IPTO was ended. DARPA also made a decision to curtail its involvement in networking research. Further responsibility for the Internet in the US became split between DARPA and the NSF. This chapter will explore the contradictory experience of the birth, development and problems experienced by the IPTO and IPT community. What are the implications of the IPTO experience to continued technological and scientific development of the Internet and of computer science research? What lessons can be learned for future science and technology policy from the IPTO experience? What does the IPTO experience suggest is a possible form of research program that it is important to understand? What forms of protection in such a program are needed for researchers? How are the needs of such a scientific research program different from the needs of normal procurement that the government does? How are they different from a research program based on peer review? These questions will be raised and discussed. The question of whether there are lessons from the IPTO experience that can be useful for the future will be explored. Are there lessons from the experience of IPTO, along with the experience of ONR and AFOSR that can be useful in proposing a future direction for some form of science technology policy in general and for policy regarding the future development of the Internet, in particular? Is there a need to create an institutional entity that is international in scope, to carry on long range planning and administration for the Internet? If so what does the experience of IPTO suggest are lessons that it would do well to learn from in considering how to create such a government institutional form? This chapter will propose that there are vital lessons that need to be learned from the experience of IPTO and especially from how IPTO made possible the early conceptual and development research that gave birth to the Internet. ---------------- Title On the International Origins of the Internet: A Conceptual History: by Ronda Hauben rh120@columbia.edu Introduction Chapter 1 - The science of information, communication and control - the early post World War II interdisciplinary circles of engineers and scientists create a fertile ground. Chapter 2 - The Information Processing Techniques Office and the Birth of the Internet: A Study in Governance http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/lick101.doc (The Information Processing Techniques Office and the Birth of the Internet A Study in Governance) Chapter 3 - Creating ARPA as the Needed Interface http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/arpa_ipto.txt (Computer Science and the Role of Government in Creating the Internet: ARPA/IPTO (1962-1986) Creating the Needed Interface) Chapter 4 - Basic Research for the National Defense and the U.S. Department of Defense: A Paradox? http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/basicresearch.txt Chapter 5 - IPTO Centers of Excellence and Creating a Resource Sharing Network http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/centers-excellence.txt Chapter 6 - Developing the New Field of Computer Communications http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/computer-communications.txt Chapter 7 - The Birth of the Internet: An Architectural Conception to Solve the Multiple Network Problem http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_internet.txt Chapter 8 - Designing the Internetworking Protocol TCP/IP Creating SATNET and PRNET and linking them with the ARPANET http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_tcp.txt (The Internet: On its International Origins and Collaborative Vision A Work In Progress) Chapter 9 - IPTO as the Center of the IPT Community, the Pressures on the IPTO, and their Efforts to Protect the IPT Community: Turning Basic Research into Applied Research? Chapter 10 - TCP digest: Creating the Cutover to TCP and the early Internet - Even the DoD is not easily won to TCP/IP http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/tcpdraft.txt (A Study of the ARPANET TCP/IP Digest and of the Role of Online Communication in the Transition from the ARPANET to the Internet ) Chapter 11 - Unix is spread thru the International Technical Community, especially in Europe. Chapter 12 - The Vision of Computer Networking Spreads in Europe, even in Eastern Europe http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/chemnitzpap.doc (The Vision of Computer Networking Communication and its Influence on East-West Relations and the GDR) Chapter 13 - Spreading the Net and networking and the Emergence of the Netizen - the role of mailing lists and newsgroups in building the Internet http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/citizenpap.html (The International Origins of the Internet and the Emergence of the Netizen: Is the Early Vision Still Viable?) http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/usenet_early_days.txt ( Early Usenet(1981-2) Creating the Broadsides for Our Day) http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/msghist.txt (ARPANET Mailing Lists and Usenet Newsgroups Creating an Open and Scientific Process for Technology Development and Diffusion) Chapter 14- The End of the IPTO and the Legacy - What are the implications toward the future of the Internet? last updated : September 14, 2005