Arpanet Quotes

he gets on this ARPAnet trip, and I swear it’s like acid, a whole ’nother strange world—time, space, all that shit.” “So when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz?” “What. Why would they do that?” “Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn’t want us to see? Why should information be any different?

By the late 1960s such visions would inspire Dad’s hand-picked successors to implement his Intergalactic Network, now known as the Arpanet. By the 1970s, moreover, they would begin to expand the Arpanet even further, into the network of networks known today as the Internet.

In 1981 Lawrence Landweber at the University of Wisconsin pulled together a consortium of universities that were not connected to the ARPANET to create another network based on TCP/IP protocols, which was called CSNET.

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.

2001’s production notes contain a number of startlingly prescient glimpses of the world we live in today. As of mid-1965, approximately the same time that the US Department of Defense was conceiving of the internet’s direct predecessor, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), Kubrick’s intrepid band of futurists had seemingly already visualized important aspects of the new technology’s implications. One document sent from Tony Masters to Roger Caras on June 29 listed matter-of-factly—under a letterhead replete with the roaring MGM lion—nine props that he asked Caras to help him with. Number one was “2001 newspaper to be read on some kind of television screen. Should be designed television screen shape; i.e., wider than it is high.

A handbook for users of the Arpanet at MIT in the 1980s reminded them that ‘sending electronic messages over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal’. The internet revolution might have happened ten years earlier if academics had not been dependent on a government network antipathetic to commercial use. Well,

Nguyên mẫu Internet được trình làng vào năm 1969, mang tên ARPAnet - một mạng nội bộ thô sơ nói giữa Bộ Quốc Phòng Hoa Kỳ và một số trường đại học, và phòng thí nghiệm của chính phủ. Được Lầu Năm Góc tài trợ, ARPAnet giúp cho một nhóm các nhà nghiên cứu trao đổi ý kiến và thông số, họ tiết kiệm được thời gian dùng máy tính và phương tiện, thông qua mạng nội này. Lúc đó máy tính còn yếu và thiếu thốn, qua mạng nội bộ, kỹ thuật viên ở trung UCLA có thể chạy được các chương trình trên các máy tính đặt ở Cambridge, Massachusetts, và nhân viên ở những nơi đó trao đổi dữ liệu với nhau.

This interplay of military and academic motives became ingrained in the Internet. “The design of both the ARPANET and the Internet favored military values, such as survivability, flexibility, and high performance, over commercial goals, such as low cost, simplicity, or consumer appeal,” the technology historian Janet Abbate noted. “At the same time, the group that designed and built ARPA’s networks was dominated by academic scientists, who incorporated their own values of collegiality, decentralization of authority, and open exchange of information into the system.”90 These academic researchers of the late 1960s, many of whom associated with the antiwar counterculture, created a system that resisted centralized command. It would route around any damage from a nuclear attack but also around any attempt to impose control.

Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto. He typed in “L.” The guy at SRI told him that it had been received. Then he typed in “O.” That, too, was confirmed. When he typed in “G,” the system hit a memory snag because of an auto-complete feature and crashed. Nevertheless, the first message had been sent across the ARPANET, and if it wasn’t as eloquent as “The Eagle has landed” or “What has God wrought,” it was suitable in its understated way: “Lo.” As in “Lo and behold.” In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, “22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.”101

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.

In recent years, something we now all depend on—the Internet, originally ARPANET—was developed as a complex collaboration of universities, government agencies, and industry, funded largely by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

An essential innovation during the development stage of the Internet was e-mail. It was invented in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, who developed software to send electronic mail messages to any computer on ARPAnet. He decided to use the @ symbol to signify the location of the computer user, thus establishing the “login name@host computer” convention for e-mail addresses.

Now, I won’t dwell on this, but it is interesting to note that ARPAnet is an anagram of “pan tare.” Pan, a mythological, goat-legged creature, was reputed to rape women and commit all manner of adulterous and lecherous acts. Pan has now come to serve as a prefix meaning “everywhere at once” or “worldwide,” as in “pandemic.” Tares are weeds and were used by Jesus as representing the evil that the enemy has sown in a field:

Ninety feet directly beneath the center courtyard café in the middle of the Pentagon—previously known as the Ground Zero Cafe, because when the bomb dropped that was where it would most likely detonate—there is a deep subbasement office with ferroconcrete walls and a filtered air supply, accessible by discreet elevators and staircases from all five wings of the main building. It was designed as a deep command bunker back when the worst threats were raids by long-range Luftwaffe bombers bearing conventional explosives. Obsolescent since the morning of July 16, 1945—it won’t withstand a direct ground burst from an atom bomb, much less more modern munitions—it still possesses certain uses. Being deep underground and equidistant from all the other wings, it was well suited as a switch for SCAN, the Army’s automatic switched communications system, and later for AUTOVON. AUTOVON led to ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, and the secure exchange in the basement played host to one of the first IMPs—Interface Message Processors—outside of academia. By the early 1980s a lack of rackspace led the DoD to relocate their hardened exchanges to a site closer to the 1950s-sized mainframe halls. And it was then that the empty bunker was taken over by a shadowy affiliate of the National Security Agency, tasked with waging occult warfare against the enemies of the nation. The past six months have brought some changes. There is a pentagonal main room inside the bunker, and within it there is a ceremonial maze, inscribed in blood and silver that glows with a soft fluorescence, converging on a dais at the heart of the design. The labyrinth takes the shape of a pentacle aligned with the building overhead: at each corner stands a motionless sentinel clad head to toe in occlusive silver fabric. Robed in black and crimson silk and shod in slippers of disturbingly pale leather, the Deputy Director paces her way through the maze. In her left hand she bears a jewel-capped scepter carved from the femur of a dead pope, and in her right hand she bears a gold-plated chalice made from a skull that once served Josef Stalin as an ashtray. As she walks she recites a prayer of allegiance and propitiation, its cadences and grammar those of a variant dialect of Old Enochian.

Here is the paradox that libertarians just don’t get: the Internet was conceived and paid for by the US government. It was not a product of the free market as we think of it today—the realization of some young entrepreneur’s dreams. It was painstakingly researched and executed by a bunch of academics for whom IPO billions weren’t a reason to work. Rather, these people were fundamentally convinced that they could make the world a better place with their inventions. Every piece of code—HTML, TCP/IP—was donated to the ARPANET project royalty-free.

In the beginning ARPA created the Arpanet. "And the Arpanet was without form and void. "And darkness was upon the deep. "And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, 'Let there be a protocol,' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good. "And ARPA said, 'Let there be more protocols,' and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good. "And ARPA said, 'Let there be more networks,' and it was so.

Like Roberts's first paper outlining the proposed Arpanet seven years earlier, the Cerf-Kahn paper of May 1974 described something revolutionary. Under the framework described in the paper, messages should be encapsulated and decapsulated in "datagrams," much as a letter is put into and taken out of an envelope, and sent as end-to-end packets. These messages would be called transmission-control protocol, or TCP, messages. The paper also introduced the notion of gateways, which would read only the envelope so that only the receiving hosts would read the contents.

15 billion people were born in the 19th and 20th centuries but try to imagine how different the global economy and the whole world would be today if just seven of them never existed Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Gavrilo Princip, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Martin Luther King. I'm not even sure that's the most meaningful list. But almost everything about the world today from borders, to technology, to social norms would be different if these seven people hadn't left their mark. Another way to put this is that 0.000000 00004% of people were responsible for perhaps the majority of the world's direction over the last century. The same goes for projects innovations and events. Imagine the last century without the Great Depression, World War II, the Manhattan Project, vaccines. Antibiotics, ARPAnet, September 11th, the fall of the Soviet Union. How many projects and events occurred in the 20th century? Billions, trillions, who knows? But those eight alone impacted the world orders upon orders of magnitude more than others.

In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s Arpanet sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1. In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, search, and communicate. The Web2 era has also been one of centralization. Network effects and economies of scale have led to clear winners, and those companies (many of which I mentioned above) have produced mind-boggling wealth for themselves and their shareholders by scraping users’ data and selling targeted ads against it. This has allowed services to be offered for “free,” though users initially didn’t understand the implications of that bargain. Web2 also created new ways for regular people to make money, such as through the sharing economy and the sometimes-lucrative job of being an influencer.

the Kahn-Cerf internetworking protocols had become the official standard of the Defense Department in 1980, and the Arpanet itself had switched over to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983—an event that many would call the actual birth of the Internet.

By 1990 the Arpanet was history.

The Arpanet was up and running for real

BBN engineer named Ray Tomlinson had sent a message between the company’s two PDP-10s—the same ones that BBN was using to run the Arpanet itself, as it happened.

Tomlinson had already written an E-mail utility for Tenex, BBN’s new time-shared operating system for the PDP-10, and had also begun to experiment with a new version of the Arpanet’s file-transfer protocol. So putting the two together seemed a natural step.

The Aloha system, he learned, was an experimental, ARPA-funded network that transmitted computer data via radio waves, instead of via the telephone lines used in the Arpanet.

Kahn and Cerf had already started planning it out: a completely rewritten version of the existing Arpanet protocol that they called TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol.

nearly a decade would pass before TCP/IP was stable enough for ARPA to shift the whole Arpanet over to it.

the prototype version of the Internet, the Arpanet, was developed in nineteen sixty-nine, at UCLA. Nineteen sixty-nine.

The ARPAnet/PDP-10 culture, wedded to LISP and MACRO and TOPS-10 and ITS and SAIL. The Unix and C crowd with their PDP-11s and VAXen and pokey telephone connections. And an anarchic horde of early microcomputer enthusiasts bent on taking computer power to the people.

*It would be several years before overall activity on the ARPANET significantly surpassed what PARC generated within its own building. As late as 1979 the average daily traffic on the PARC Ethernet, which linked 120 Altos and Dorados, came to fully half what was carried nationwide on the entire ARPANET.

Nevertheless, they felt a powerful urge to impart their wisdom to their friends at ARPA. Thanks to the legal beagles’ strictures, they were reduced to getting their points across by a weird pantomime of asking inscrutable but cunningly pointed questions. “Somebody would be talking about the design for some element and we’d drop all these hints,” Shoch recalled. “We’d say, ‘You know, that’s interesting, but what happens if this error message comes back, and what happens if that’s followed by a delayed duplicate that was slowed down in its response from a distant gateway when the flow control wouldn’t take it but it worked its way back and got here late? What do you do then?’ There would be this pause and they’d say, ‘You’ve tried this!’ And we’d reply, ‘Hey, we never said that!’” Eventually they managed to communicate enough of Pup’s architecture for it to become a crucial part of the ARPANET standard known as TCP/IP, which to this date is what enables data packets to pass gracefully across the global data network known as the Internet—with a capital “I.