How the Web Was Won  

This year marks the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary moment. In 1958 the United States government set up a special unit, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (arpa), to help jump-start new efforts in science and technology. This was the agency that would nurture the Internet. 

Millions of words—multiplied and sent forth by the technology itself—have been written on the world-changing significance of the Internet, for good or ill, and the point hardly needs belaboring. Surprisingly, few books have been written that cover the full history of the Internet, from progenitors such as Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider up through the entrepreneurial age of our own times. Not many people recall that the first impetus for what became the technology of the Internet had its origins in Cold War theorizing about nuclear warfare. 

To observe this year’s twin anniversaries, Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it. 

I: The Conception 

Paul Baran, an electrical engineer, conceived one of the Internet’s building blocks—packet switching—while working at the Rand Corporation around 1960. Packet switching breaks data into chunks, or “packets,” and lets each one take its own path to a destination, where they are re-assembled (rather than sending everything along the same path, as a traditional telephone circuit does). A similar idea was proposed independently in Britain by Donald Davies. Later in his career, Baran would pioneer the airport metal detector. 

Paul Baran: It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind. The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system. At that time the Strategic Air Command had just two forms of communication. One was the U.S. telephone system, or an overlay of that, and the other was high-frequency or shortwave radio. 

So that left us with the interesting situation of saying, Well, why do the communications fail when the bombs were aimed, not at the cities, but just at the strategic forces? And the answer was that the collateral damage was sufficient to knock out a telephone system that was highly centralized. Well, then, let’s not make it centralized. Let’s spread it out so that we can have other paths to get around the damage. 

I get credit for a lot of things I didn’t do. I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole goddamned Internet, you know? Technology reaches a certain ripeness and the pieces are available and the need is there and the economics look good—it’s going to get invented by somebody.  

Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at U.C.L.A., was instrumental in creating the earliest computer networks, in the 1960s. J. C. R. Licklider, one of the fathers of computer science and information technology, was the first director of arpa’s computer-science division. 

Leonard Kleinrock: Licklider was a strong, driving visionary, and he set the stage. He foresaw two aspects of what we now have. His early work—he was a psychologist by training—was in what he called man-computer symbiosis. When you put a computer in the hands of a human, the interaction between them becomes much greater than the individual parts. And he also foresaw a great change in the way activity would take place: education, creativity, commerce, just general information access. He foresaw a connected world of information. 

The culture was one of: You find a good scientist. Fund him. Leave him alone. Don’t over-manage. Don’t tell him how to do something. You may tell him what you’re interested in: I want artificial intelligence. I want a network. I want time-sharing. Don’t tell him how to do it. 

Robert Taylor left nasa and became the third director of arpa’s computer-science division. Taylor’s chief scientist was Larry Roberts, who oversaw development of the Arpanet. arpa’s director was Charles Herzfeld.  

Bob Taylor: Sputnik in 1957 surprised a lot of people, and Eisenhower asked the Defense Department to set up a special agency, so that we would not get caught with our pants down again.  

arpa was a go-for-broke kind of culture. First of all, it had a lot of carte blanche. If arpa asked some cooperation from the air force or the navy or the army, they got it instantly and automatically. There was no interagency bickering. It had a lot of clout and little or no red tape. To get something going was very easy.  

Leonard Kleinrock: Bob Taylor, who was funding many research computer scientists around the country, recognized that accessing each of the computers was a pain in the neck.  

Bob Taylor: There were individual instances of interactive computing through time-sharing, sponsored by arpa, scattered around the country. In my office in the Pentagon I had one terminal that connected to a time-sharing system at M.I.T. I had another one that connected to a time-sharing system at U.C. Berkeley. I had one that connected to a time-sharing system at the System Development Corporation, in Santa Monica. There was another terminal that connected to the Rand Corporation. 

And for me to use any of these systems, I would have to move from one terminal to the other. So the obvious idea came to me: Wait a minute. Why not just have one terminal, and it connects to anything you want it to be connected to? And, hence, the Arpanet was born. 

When I had this idea about building a network—this was in 1966—it was kind of an “Aha” idea, a “Eureka!” idea. I went over to Charlie Herzfeld’s office and told him about it. And he pretty much instantly made a budget change within his agency and took a million dollars away from one of his other offices and gave it to me to get started. It took about 20 minutes.  

Paul Baran:The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense. They automatically assumed that we didn’t know what we were doing.  

Bob Taylor: Working with AT&T would be like working with Cro-Magnon man. I asked them if they wanted to be early members so they could learn technology as we went along. They said no. I said, Well, why not? And they said, Because packet switching won’t work. They were adamant. As a result, AT&T missed out on the whole early networking experience.  

Robert Kahn worked on the technical staff at Bell Laboratories before joining the electrical-engineering faculty at M.I.T. In 1966 he left to become a networking theorist at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—where he worked until 1972, when he was named head of arpa’s computer branch. He teamed with Vint Cerf to devise the TCP and IP networking protocols in the 1970s. 

Bob Kahn: Let me put it into perspective. So here we are when there are very few time-sharing systems anywhere in the world. AT&T probably said, Look, maybe we would have 50 or a hundred organizations, maybe a few hundred organizations, that could possibly partake of this in any reasonable time frame. Remember, the personal computer hadn’t been invented yet. So, you had to have these big expensive mainframes in order to do anything. They said, There’s no business there, and why should we waste our time until we can see that there’s a business opportunity? That’s why a place like arpa is so important. 

Best known for founding, editing, and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand is a techie anthropologist and a co-founder of the Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation. 

Stewart Brand: This was a time which was pretty much arpa-derived, in the sense that the money for computers and for networking computers was coming from the government, and from pretty enlightened leadership there. The idea of Arpanet was that it was going to basically join up computational resources. It was not set up primarily to do e-mail—but the computational-resource connection turned out to be not so important, and the e-mail turned out to be the killer app. These were people who were just trying those two experiments, one to try to make the computational resources blend, and the other to stay in touch with each other conveniently. You were inventing in all directions, with no particular certainty what was going to play out. 

Anyway, we were all engineers of both ilks, the narrow-tie, nine-to-five serious engineers and the stay-up-all-night long-haired hackers who had earned their way into the respect of the engineers. And pretty much everybody was male.  

NEXT: Part 2 – The Creation 

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