
Larry Roberts has died - jbegley
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/obituaries/lawrence-g-roberts-dies-at-81.html
======
kuhhk
I highly recommend reading the book “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, which covers
much of the history that this article touches upon. Great book.

[https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-
Late/dp/0684832...](https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-
Late/dp/0684832674)

~~~
pacificmint
It's been years since I read that book, but the one thing that surprised me
the most was how much the phone companies didn't believe in packet switching.

They thought anything that wasn't connection oriented was nonsense. The
internet basically grew in spite of the established telcos, not thru them.

Around the same time as the book, Wired had an article "Netheads vs Bellheads"
[1] which covers the same tension. It's interesting to read an article from a
time when it was accepted knowledge that ATM was the future of the internet,
and it was newsworthy that a few heretics thought otherwise.

[1]
[https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/](https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/)

~~~
myself248
> phone companies didn't believe in packet switching.

Sure didn't. It's a terrible way to treat voice calls, and as far as the phone
company was concerned, voice was the only thing.

Data could ride a voice-grade connection just fine, but voice suffered badly
when "statistically multiplexed", a term used (oft derisively) to refer to
packetization.

This is still true, by the way. Radio studios still use ISDN links to other
studios, because they have fixed latency and incredibly low jitter.

Customers have gotten used to the latency of digital mobile phones, but some
of us still remember the truly simultaneous conversation of a landline or
analog cellphone. (I remember the rollout of digital, and the... and the
con.... go ahead.... no, you go ahead... okay, the confusion as people were
just learning to converse with a delay on the line.) It just turned out that
cheaper capacity was more important.

ATM was always a dead-end, though. I think a lot of people knew that even as
it was being deployed. If you're packetizing anyway, you might as well throw
QoS right out the window and embrace nondeterminism wholeheartedly. It's
cheaper, and that writing was already on the wall. Quality had been the mantra
for the first hundred years of the Bell system, but deregulation and
competition allowed the almighty dollar to prevail over every other concern.
Enjoy the jitter!

~~~
chiefalchemist
> "Data could ride a voice-grade connection just..."

Perhaps this mindset was true at the AT&T / (eventual) RBOC level but at the
R&D level I believe the story was different.

My father worked for Western Electric. For those who don't already know, WE's
role was to take Bell Labs "raw" R&D and make it work commercially. In any
case, when I was a pre-teen / teen (think early to mid 70's, if my memory
serves me correctly) I remember going to an annual open house (for family
members) an seeing demos on fiber optics.

Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to me.

p.s. Fwiw my father actually worked on a technology that then competed with
fiber. As we know now, fiber won. My point is, there was a sense somewhere
that additional capacity was necessary. That amount of investment for the
growth of voice might be possible, but I don't think so.

~~~
caf
_Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to
me._

If you've seen the eye-watering cost of 1600 pair copper bearers, not to
mention the sheer time taken to joint it, you'd see why the telcos were keen
on fibre for voice.

------
tlb
It's easy to underestimate the importance of actually deploying those first
long-distance internet links, at substantial expense. Links within a campus
weren't compelling enough to invent things like email to make use of them,
because you could just walk over to the other guy's office. But high-speed
(for the time) links between campuses made people want to use them for real
work.

~~~
nostrademons
I wonder if they knew how powerful this infrastructure would be at the time
they did it. This presentation [1] (by Larry Roberts, actually) indicates that
basically nobody other than ARPA actually wanted this capability - the other
big institutions at the time either didn't want to share their data
(universities) or thought the whole technical approach was crazy and brain-
dead (telcos).

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkD4HVRnGJE#t=580](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkD4HVRnGJE#t=580)

~~~
kev009
Large institutions had these capabilities since the 1960s. There were parallel
universes like Tymnet and companies would set up first party networks using
vendor protocols like IBM's SNA (which had a few precursors like QTAM). Users
were concentrated onto large machines but machine to machine communication was
equally important. This history and significance seems appallingly preserved.

There were even parallel universe packet switched networks by phone companies
like Bell and MCI in the US.

The novelty of the ARPANet was that it allowed for the construction of a
resilient open access network (Tymnet and various phone companies packet
switchers were centrally administered walled gardens). Once the code was
coupled to UNIX in the form TCP in BSD, it rode that wave and the sequel of
"open systems" a few years later into ubiquity across all operating systems.

~~~
csours
The auto assembly plant I worked in had SNA (active, but unused) in 2006.

~~~
dfox
Various circuit switched (ISDN) or non-IP packet switched technologies
(SNA/X.25/Frame Relay) are apparently often used as backup links for various
automotive EDI stuff for JIT ordering.

~~~
csours
It was the uplink to the mothership for vehicle content broadcast. JIT was
local DSL.

------
gist
In college (on the arpanet) I teleneted to all the hosts on the internet
(cross country) and back to where I was (a major ivy university). Just for
fun. Just to see how long it took for my keystrokes to return. Back then no pw
was needed to do that.

To those who have never used a green terminal or teletype it was actually
plenty of fun. The teletype was fun because of the noise and the tactile
feeback you got and printing pounding out some output. The green terminal was
fun because crt's are mesmerizing or at least they were to me. I still have
one of the computer tapes that I had to buy to store the 'programs' that I
wrote.

(One of the TA's in the computer center was Eric Raymond..).

------
ThomasBHickey
I knew Larry Roberts in the mid 1980's when he was on the Board of OCLC (a
library network). At the time he was president of a company on the west coast
of the US and another on the east coast. He claimed to visit both of them
every week! He was excited about Group 3 fax that was going to rapidly change
how libraries worked and tried to convince OCLC to replace our computers with
a network of IBM AT's. Both ideas had just enough sense to be dangerous, but
the software, networks and general infrastructure wasn't there yet and it was
beyond our capability to build them.

------
pseudolus
Interesting. The Times interviewed him in May of this year for his own
obituary.

"He recalled that one of his youthful experiments produced a chlorine gas
byproduct, 'which put me in the hospital under an oxygen tent because I
sniffed it to see what was happening,' he said in an interview for this
obituary in May."

~~~
totoglazer
It’s actually somewhat common. They have ~1000 obit drafts prewritten at any
given time, including interviews with subjects when it’s possible.

~~~
emmelaich
> _It’s actually somewhat common ..._

Phew I thought you were referring to chlorine gas poisoning for a moment :-)

~~~
veddox
We had a pretty crazy science teacher when I was in grade 8. If we'd been
anywhere in the West he would have probably been suspended for gross
negligence faster than anything, but we kids loved him :D

One day we were covering chlorine in chemistry class, so he simply decided to
make some. We didn't have a fume cupboard or anything (our lab at the time was
still very rudimentary), so we simply set the equipment up on a desk and
waited for things to happen. When green smoke started billowing forth, we
hurriedly opened all the windows and evacuated the lab. All other science
lessons that day had to take place in different classrooms...

This was the same guy who showed us the thermite reaction - indoors - and with
whom we used potassium+water to light a bunsen burner when we'd run out of
matches. This year I was back at that school, now as a science teacher myself,
and was there for the move into a fancy new lab building. But the old lab
still had the burn marks on the ceiling, from some of his wilder
experiments...

~~~
cormorant
Indoor thermite and burn marks on the ceiling (and other stuff I won't mention
now) also happens in the US, at least as of 10 years ago when I was in high
school. I loved that class.

------
yiyus
That picture is not from "a conference in Spain". They received the Prince of
Asturias Award. This is the most important award you can get in Spain. It is
similar in spirit to Nobel prizes. Of course, it does not have the same
prestige, but NYT should know better.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_of_Asturias_Awards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_of_Asturias_Awards)

~~~
donarb
That’s the caption of the photo from Getty Images which is an accurate
depiction of what’s in the photograph, it does not depict the award ceremony
itself.

“Internet Pioneers Attend Media Conference OVIEDO, SPAIN - OCTOBER 24: (L-R)
Internet pioneers Vinton Cerf, Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and
Tim Berners-Lee attend a media conference the day before they receive the
Prince of Asturias award for Science and Technology investigation October 24,
2002 in Oviedo, Spain. (Photo by Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images)”

[https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/internet-
pione...](https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/internet-pioneers-
vinton-cerf-lawrence-roberts-robert-kahn-news-photo/1518552)

------
default-kramer
> One thing you ought to watch out for is you can’t send out personal message
> stuff, that’s illegal. That’s against the postal laws and you’ll be in jail
> in no time.

Is this true, that "postal laws" used to prohibit personal email?

~~~
seibelj
If a few people are doing something illegal, it's a crime. If everyone is
doing something illegal, it quickly stops being a crime, or there is
widespread outrage when someone is prosecuted.

~~~
TylerE
If only.

(Counterexamples: Drug laws, speeding laws, digital piracy...)

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vxNsr
@dang

Recommendation: I saw the black bar but this post was already fairly far down
the page, maybe make clicking on the bar take you to the post that
precipitated it.

~~~
dhimes
I have a second recommendation: Since Nancy Grace Roman has also died, it's
not clear whom the bar is for. Possibly for both? It would be nice if there
was a way to find out. Maybe something in the footer, or as you say, by making
something clickable.

I have this problem with flags at half-mast in my town, also. It's at half-
mast quite often, but people seldom know why.

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glafa
here is his website, doesn't seem very updated (latest stuff is from 2009).
RIP [http://packet.cc/](http://packet.cc/)

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Lotus123
Indeed, another one of the legendary internet pioneers are now gone.

~~~
wkearney99
And meanwhile his efforts help route around the loss.

------
mudil
[https://outline.com/SrEhzh](https://outline.com/SrEhzh)

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anonytrary
Did the internet just learn of Roberts death today? He died 4 days ago. Is the
black bar for Roberts? If so, why wasn't this up 4 days ago?

~~~
dang
As far as I can tell, this was the first posting of the news to HN. Surprising
that it took 4 days to appear.

~~~
anonytrary
Yes, it was surprising is all, I meant no offense.

------
wittedhaddock
death fucking sucks

