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Main News Sports Business Style Commentary Examiner Home The Gate ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wednesday, Aug. 21, 1996 á Page B 1 © 1996 San Francisco Examiner ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Internet a result of aid to science

Washington today wouldn't fund such a project, authors say

Tom Abate EXAMINER TECHNOLOGY WRITER

Thirty years ago, generous federal support allowed a handful of imaginative computer scientists to tinker with technologies that eventually grew into the Internet.

But the authors of a new history of the global net said the current short-sighted, tight-fisted attitude in Washington, D.C., might not support the same sort of innovation today.

Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, authors of "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet," said support for science has withered in the decades since the missile gap and the space race and made scientific research a national imperative.

"If it were today's environment, the Internet would never have been built," said Hafner, a technology correspondent for Newsweek Magazine.

Lyon, her husband and co-author, said presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were both willing to fund "blue sky" research projects that didn't have immediate payoffs but seemed to promise future, if unforeseen, benefits.

"And the scientists were good," Lyon said. "They delivered."

Much credit for creation of the Internet belongs to the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Defense Department office created by Eisenhower to fund research. Hafner and Lyon write that early ARPA officials like Bob Taylor, now retired in Woodside, created an oversight process that let researchers engage in a certain playfulness without being wasteful.

In one key incident in 1966, Taylor, then 34, went into the office of his boss, ARPA director Charles Herzfeld, to suggest that ARPA develop a network to link computers together. Taylor said it should work in such a way that all the computers could share the data-processing load, so the network could keep sending data even if a machine or two went down.

The conversation took about 20 minutes, and when it was over, Taylor had been given $1 million to fund research on what would eventually become the Internet.

"It was just that casual," Hafner said.

Of course, it took computer scientists more than a dozen years and many millions of dollars to solve the technical problems that made building a computer network something more easily said than done.

Along the way, scientists came up with two key innovations that were singled out for mention in the book. The first was creating a new way to move information through wires.

As Hafner and Lyon explain, data had been moving through wires since the invention of the telegraph in the mid-1800s. But the telegraph, as well as the telephone that succeeded it, both worked like pipelines in which information flowed continuously like water.

In the 1960s, Paul Baran, a computer scientist at the Rand Corp., came up with a new idea. Instead of one big pipe carrying a constant flow of data, why not build many smaller pipes to carry data a bucket at a time? If one pipe broke, subsequent buckets could take a different pipe. British scientist Donald Davies came up with much the same idea at about the same time. He gave the name "packets" to these data droplets. To this day, the name has stuck.

ARPA-supported researchers applied this packet concept to their network-building projects. In time, however, several network "languages" evolved. A second breakthrough was necessary to break this Tower of Babel and let the various networks exchange data.

In 1973, ARPA researchers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn came up with a scheme for translating among networks. It involved creating a common "envelope" in which different types of network data could be wrapped. They called their system TCP, short for transmission control protocol. It became the base language of what we now call the Internet.

Far from portraying the scientists as all-knowing seers, Hafner and Lyon show how their biggest advances came through serendipity.

In the early 1970s, for instance, scientists working under contract to ARPA created a program to transfer large files between computers. As an afterthought, engineer Ray Tomlinson adapted this program so people could also send short, impromptu messages over the network. That last-minute addition evolved into what we now call electronic mail.

"It was a total technical afterthought," Hafner said. "But it turned out everybody wanted to talk," and within a short time, three-quarters of the traffic on the network consisted of e-mail.

"Where Wizards Stay Up Late" was published this month by Simon & Schuster (304 pp., $24).

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