
Fifty years ago, the internet was born in Room 3420 - vontzy
https://www.fastcompany.com/90423457/50-years-ago-today-the-internet-was-born-in-room-3420
======
simula67
> Taylor had an even more practical reason to crave a network. He was
> regularly getting requests from researchers around the country for funds to
> buy bigger and better mainframe computers.

> Taylor talked ARPA director Charles Herzfeld into allocating a million
> dollars for R&D into a new network to connect the computers at MIT, UCLA,
> SRI, and many other sites. Herzfeld got the money by redirecting it from a
> ballistic missile research program into the ARPA budget. The cost was
> justified within DoD circles by saying that ARPA was tasked with building a
> “survivable” network that wouldn’t go down if any specific part was
> destroyed, perhaps in a nuclear attack.

This story seems very similar to the Unix story[1]. Ritchie and Thompson
wanted to play Space Travel and started building Unix. Eventually, management
invested for a different reason: they wanted a good system for text processing
of patent applications.

I guess in the early days, no one saw the potential of computers and
networking. Therefore there had to be a weird convergence of interests of
various stakeholders for projects to get off the ground.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix)

------
chi42
I used to have circuits lab in this room, before an art student had the idea
of turning it into a memorial. It used to just have a paper sign on the door
marking the event:

[http://lh5.ggpht.com/azn.jalapeno/SQf_wBSxnoI/AAAAAAAAArg/nH...](http://lh5.ggpht.com/azn.jalapeno/SQf_wBSxnoI/AAAAAAAAArg/nHE4V2tqFoU/s800/pic_big.jpg)

[http://lh4.ggpht.com/azn.jalapeno/SQf9KtQGgNI/AAAAAAAAArE/L7...](http://lh4.ggpht.com/azn.jalapeno/SQf9KtQGgNI/AAAAAAAAArE/L7K33Xu_G1g/s800/DSC00023.JPG)

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ahje
> we leased this line from AT&T at the blazing speed of 50,000 bits per second

It's amazing that we still have a small number of people connected with
connections that are slower than the first one ever, 50 years ago.

~~~
Aperocky
Funny how that technological innovation have sped up so much that 50 years is
now (actually, today it'd be less) considered to be the time that the average
person should have something better than the state-of-the-art at the time.

This is definitely not true for the majority of history. The way the world ran
in 1979 would not have been that much notifiably different than 1929, even
though people have landed on the moon. Today, the life of the average Joe is
completely transformed by internet.

------
Animats
Amusingly, there was a commercial alternative in the same period - Tymnet.
Tymshare, a computer time-sharing company ("the cloud", version -1) had
machines at various locations and wanted to connect them. So they had their
own packet switching network, mostly for terminal to mainframe connections.
Control and route setup were centralized (this is now called "software defined
networking") but packet forwarding was distributed.

Tymnet was very cost-effective. Its purpose was to share expensive 9600 baud
leased lines (hundreds of dollars a month) among multiple Teletype machines
running at 110 to 300 baud. Worked fine. Remote echo was rather sluggish, as
echoed characters tended to come back in groups of four characters. That's
because they used an accumulation timer approach - wait until you have some
minimum amount of data or the timer has run out. This is terrible for latency.
(The current version of that is the "delayed ACK" timer in TCP, which I
consider a mistake.)

There was a real question in the early days over whether networking would be
packet-switched like the ARPANET or circuit switched like Tymnet, X.25, and
SNA. I thought at the time (1970s) that circuit switching would win out,
because packet switching cannot deal well with congestion in the middle of the
network. I didn't expect fiber backbone bandwidth to get so cheap that the
congestion stayed at the edges.

------
mikece
Let’s not forget the significance of the wording of “request for comment” in
the original networking specs. All of the inventors of TCP/IP were academics
working on gov’t grants and didn’t have the authority to create specifications
for network protocol... but if the spec were present as an invitation for
discussion rather than “hey, I figured this out and this is how I’m doing it
and you should too” then the project managers and bean counters were happy
about it.

See RFC 2555:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2555](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2555)

------
louwrentius
I’m actually now listening to the book “where wizards stay up late”, a book
about the origins of ARPAnet and the Internet. I’s a bit dry at times but I
like it.

~~~
nemacol
Just finished it a week or two ago after learning about it from the podcast
"50 things that made the modern economy". I agree it's a little dry, but it is
easy to listen to while doing other things.

Good stuff, I recommend it as well.

------
danboarder
This excerpt is fascinating: "..Taylor talked ARPA director Charles Herzfeld
into allocating a million dollars for R&D into a new network to connect the
computers at MIT, UCLA, SRI, and many other sites. Herzfeld got the money by
redirecting it from a ballistic missile research program into the ARPA budget.
The cost was justified within DoD circles by saying that ARPA was tasked with
building a “survivable” network that wouldn’t go down if any specific part was
destroyed, perhaps in a nuclear attack."

Research funding is important! I think similar arguments can be made to
increase funding for NASA projects (perhaps this already happens).

------
nickjj
Semi-related but if you enjoy the history around the internet and computing, I
highly recommend watching Halt and Catch Fire (it's on Netflix). I just
finished watching it for the first time and what a treat it was.

~~~
mxuribe
An extremely well-done tv show!

~~~
unnouinceput
An extremely well-done 1st season, that's it. Hence why the show stopped in
2017 with 4th season

~~~
ticmasta
agreed - season 1 covered all the interesting material quasi-related/inspired
by Compaq; then it turned into a dark soap opera that was basically
unwatchable

------
nanna
We're celebrating this at King's College London next Wednesday 6 November.
PechaKucha talks by the faculty of Digital Humanities followed by drinks. Come
along HN!

[https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-
ticket...](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-
tickets-77325266955?aff=ebdssbdestsearch)

------
wallflower
If you have Netflix, the segment in “Lo and Behold” with Leonard Kleinrock is
worth watching just to see his energy and excitement. The whole documentary is
a little overwhelming though.

[https://www.netflix.com/title/80097363](https://www.netflix.com/title/80097363)

------
sveit
In the middle of 1966, Robert Taylor took over the directorship of Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)[1]. It was Taylor who launched the project
that produced ARPANET. This is a great history series on ARPANET, starting
with "ARPANET, Part 1: The Inception."[2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Techniq...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Processing_Techniques_Office)

[2] [https://technicshistory.com/2019/05/08/arpanet-part-1-the-
in...](https://technicshistory.com/2019/05/08/arpanet-part-1-the-inception/)

------
tempodox
This day should be an international holiday.

~~~
appleiigs
A day where you turn off your phones and computers.

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "The cost was justified within DoD circles by saying that ARPA was
tasked with building a “survivable” network that wouldn’t go down if any
specific part was destroyed, perhaps in a nuclear attack."

Oh boy, a white lie that became a truth nowadays. Internet as it stands now
it's so resilient that after a full nuclear war to extinct us, a future alien
specie just needs to patch a few bits at cables ends and will have Earth
coverage. Internet is so resilient that look at China's great firewall effort
and still dissidents can communicate with free world.

------
phil9987
To me, today's internet was born with the invention of HTTP by Sir Tim
Berners-Lee. It's still an interesting article and a great achievement, but a
big piece has still been missing. One can definitely credit them for providing
the base though.

~~~
mmjaa
I'd been using the Internet for 10 years before HTTP came along - it was
definitely just as useful then as it is now.

Its just prettier now.

~~~
arethuza
I remember a lot of time using archie (xarchie) and ftp before the web became
ubiquitous.

~~~
rootbear
Back in the pre-web days, we used to get software via ftp, usually as source
code tar balls, from any of several well-known archive sites. One I remember
was labrea.stanford.edu. Yes, it was a tar pit...

