Chapter 7

Behind the Net: The Untold History of the ARPANET

and Computer Science
by Michael Hauben

The global Internet’s progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
(ARPANET) financed and encouraged by the U.S. Department of Defense. This is important to
remember, because the support and style of management by ARPA of its contractors was crucial to
the success of the ARPANET. As the Internet develops and the struggle over the role it plays
unfolds, it will be important to remember how the network developed and the culture with which it
was connected. The culture of the Net As a facilitator of communication, is important feature to
understand.

The ARPANET Completion Report, published jointly in 1978 by BBN of Cambridge,

Massachusetts, and ARPA, concludes by stating: “…it is somewhat fitting to end on the note that
the ARPANET program has had a strong and direct feedback into the support and strength of
computer science, from which the network itself sprung.”1 In order to understand the wonder that
the Internet and various other components of the Net represent, we need to understand why the
ARPANET Completion Report ends with the suggestion that the ARPANET is fundamentally
connected to and born of computer science rather than of the military.

Part I: the History of Arpa Leading up to the ARPANET

A climate of scientific research surrounded the entire history of the ARPANET. ARPA was
formed to fund basic research, and thus was not oriented toward military products. The formation
of this agency was part of the U.S. Government response to the then Soviet Union’s launch of
Sputnik in 1957.2 One area of ARPA supported research concerned the question of how to utilize
the military’s investment in computers to do Command and Control Research (CCR). Dr. J. C. R.
Licklider was chosen to head this effort. Licklider came to ARPA from BBN in October 1962.3 His
educational background was a combination of engineering studies and physiological psychology. His
multidiscilinary experiences provided Licklider with an unusual perspective uncommon among
engineers.

As a result of Licklider’s arrival, the Agency’s contracts were shifted from independent
corporations towards “the best academic computer centers.”4 The then current method of computing
was via batch processing. Licklider saw improvements could be made in CCR only from work that
would advance the current state of computing technology. He particularly wanted to move forward
into the age of interactive computing, and the Defense Department contractors were not moving in
that direction. In an interview, Licklider described how at one of the contractors, System
Development Corporation (SDC) the computing research being done “was based on batch
processing, and while I was interested in a new way of doing things, they [SDC] were studying how
to make improvements in the ways things were done already.”5 To reflect the changed direction
Licklider was bringing to ARPA supported research, his division of ARPA was renamed Information

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Processing Techniques Office (IPT or IPTO). The office “developed into a far-reaching basic
research program in advanced technology.”6

The Completion Report states that “Prophetically, Licklider nicknamed the group of
computer specialists he gathered the ‘Intergalactic Network’.”7 Before work on the ARPANET
began, the foundation had been established by the creation of the Information Processing Techniques
Office of ARPA. Robert Taylor, Licklider’s successor at the IPTO, reflects on how this foundation
was based on Licklider’s interest in interconnecting communities. “Lick was among the first to
perceive the spirit of community created among the users of the first time-sharing systems….” Taylor
continues, “In pointing out the community phenomena created, in part, by the sharing of resources
in one timesharing system, Lick made it easy to think about interconnecting the communities, the
interconnection of interactive, on-line communities of people,….”8

The “spirit of community” was related to Licklider’s interest in having computers help people
communicate with other people.9 Licklider’s vision of an “intergalactic network” connecting people
represented an important conceptual shift in computer science. This vision guided the researchers
who created the ARPANET. After the ARPANET was functioning, the computer scientists using
it realized that assisting human communication was a major fundamental advance that the
ARPANET made possible.

As early as 1963, a commonly asked question of the IPTO directors by the ARPA directors
about IPTO projects was “Why don’t we rely on the computer industry to do that?”, or occasionally
more strongly, “We should not support that effort because ABC (read, “computer industry”) will do
it – if it’s worth doing!”10 This question leads to an important distinction – this ARPA research was
different from what the computer industry had in mind to do, or was likely to undertake. Since
Licklider’s creation of the IPTO, the work supported by ARPA/IPTO continued his explicit emphasis
on communications. The Completion Report explains: “The ARPA theme is that the promise offered
by the computer as a communication medium between people, dwarfs into relative insignificance
the historical beginnings of the computer as an arithmetic engine.”11 The Completion Report goes
on to differentiate the research ARPA supported from the research done by the computer industry:
“The computer industry, in the main, still thinks of the computer as an arithmetic engine. Their
heritage is reflected even in current designs of their communication systems. They have an economic
and psychological commitment to the arithmetic engine model, and it can die only slowly….”12 The
Completion Report further analyzes this problem by tracing it back to the nation’s universities:
“…furthermore, it is a view that is still reinforced by most of the nation’s computer science
programs. Even universities, or at least parts of them, are held in the grasp of the arithmetic engine
concept….”13

ARPA’s IPTO was responsible for the research and development which led to the success
of first the ARPANET, and later the Internet. Without the commitment that existed via this support,
such a development might never have happened. One of ARPA’s criterion for supporting research
was that the research had to be of such a level as to offer an order of magnitude of advance over the
current state of development. Such research is never immediately profitable. In society therefore

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there is the need for organizations which do not pursue profit as their goal, but rather work on
furthering the state of the art. Computer networking was developed and spread widely in an
environment outside of commercial and profit considerations, an environment that supported such
research.

Others have understood the communications promise of computers. For example, in

RFC-1336, David Clark, senior research scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, is
quoted, “It is not proper to think of networks as connecting computers. Rather, they connect people
using computers to mediate. The great success of the internet is not technical, but in human impact.
Electronic mail may not be a wonderful advance in Computer Science, but it is a whole new way for
people to communicate. The continued growth of the Internet is a technical challenge to all of us,
but we must never loose sight of where we came from, the great change we have worked on the
larger computer community, and the great potential we have for future change.”14

Research predating the ARPANET had been done by Paul Baran, Thomas Marill and
others.15 This led Lawrence Roberts and other IPTO staff to formally introduce the topic of
networking computers of differing types (i.e., incompatible hardware and software) together in order
to make it possible for ARPA’s Principal Investigators (PI) to share resources. The ARPA Principal
Investigators meeting was held annually for university and other contractors to summarize results
of the previous year and discuss future research. In the Spring of 1967, it was held at the University
of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Networking was one of the topics brought up at this meeting. As a result
of discussion at this meeting, it was decided that there had to be agreement on conventions for
character and block transmission, error checking and retransmission, and computer and user
identification. These specifications became the contents of the inter-host communication’s
“protocol.” Frank Westervelt was chosen to write about this protocol and a communication group
was formed to study the questions.16

In order to develop a network of varied computers, two main problems had to be solved:
1. To construct a ‘subnetwork’ consisting of telephone circuits and switching nodes whose
reliability, delay characteristics, capacity, and cost would facilitate resource sharing among
computers on the network.

2. To understand, design, and implement the protocols and procedures within the operating
systems of each connected computer, in order to allow the use of the new subnetwork by
the computers in sharing resources.17

After one draft and additional work on this communications position paper were completed,
a meeting was scheduled in early October 1967 by ARPA at which the protocol paper and
specifications for the Interface Message Processor (IMP) were discussed. A subnetwork of IMPs,
dedicated mini-computers connected to each of the participant computers, was the method chosen
to connect the participants’ computers (hosts) to each other via phone lines. This standardized the
subnet to which the hosts connected. Now, only the connection of the hosts to the network would
depend on vendor type, etc. ARPA had picked 19 possible participants in what was now known as

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the “ARPA Network.”

From the time of the 1967 PI Meeting, various computer scientists who were ARPA
contractors were busy thinking about various aspects which would be relevant to the planning and
development of the ARPANET. Part of that work was a document outlining a beginning design for
the IMP subnetwork. This specification led to a competitive procurement for the design of the IMP
subnetwork.

By late 1967 ARPA had given a contract to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to write the
specifications for the communications network they were developing. In December of 1968, SRI
issued a report “A Study of Computer Network Design Parameters.” Elmer Shapiro played an
important role in the research for this report. Based on this work, Roberts and Barry Wessler of
ARPA wrote the final ARPA version of the IMP specification.18 This specification was ready to be
discussed at the June, 1968 PI meeting.

The Program Plan, “Resource Sharing Computer Networks,” was submitted June 3, 1968 by
the IPTO to the ARPA Director, who with unusual speed, approved it on June 21, 1968. It outlined
the objectives of the research, and the plan of how the objectives would be fulfilled. The purposed
network was impressive as it would prove useful to both the computing research centers which
connected to the network and the military. The proposed requirements for the research would provide
immediate benefits to the computer centers the network would connect. ARPA’s stated objectives
were to experiment with varied interconnections of computers and the sharing of resources in an
attempt to improve productivity of computer research. Justification was drawn from technical needs
in both the scientific and military environments. The Program Plan developed into a set of
specifications. These specifications were connected to a competitive Request for Quotation (RFQ)
to find an organization which would design and build the IMP subnetwork.19

Following the approval of the Program Plan, 140 potential bidders were mailed the Request
for Quotation. After a bidders conference, twelve proposals were received and from them ARPA
narrowed the bidders down to four. BBN was the eventual recipient of the contract.20

The second technical problem, as defined by the ad hoc Communications Group, still
remained to be solved. The set of agreed upon communications settings (known as a protocol), which
would allow the hosts to communicate with each other over the subnetwork, had to be developed.
This work was left “for host sites to work out among themselves.”21 This meant that the software
necessary to connect the hosts to the IMP subnetwork had to be developed. ARPA assigned this duty
to the initially designated ARPANET sites. Each of the first sites had a different type of computer
to connect. ARPA trusted that the programmers at each site would be capable of modifying their
operating systems in order to connect their systems to the subnetwork. In addition the sites needed
to develop the software necessary to utilize the other hosts on the network. By assigning them
responsibilities, ARPA made the academic computer science community an active part of the
ARPANET development team.22

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 Steve Crocker, one of graduate students involved with the development of the earliest
ARPANET protocols, associates the placement of the initial ARPANET sites at research institutions
with the fact that the ARPANET was ground-breaking research. He wrote in a message responding
to questions on the COM-PRIV mailing list: “During the initial development of the ARPANET,
there was simply a limit as to how far ahead anyone could see and manage. The IMPs were placed
in cooperative ARPA R&D sites with the hope that these research sites would figure out how to
exploit this new communication medium.”23

The first sites of the ARPANET were picked to provide either network support services or
unique resources. The key services the first four sites provided were:24
UCLA - Network Measurement Center
SRI - Network Information Center
UCSB - Culler-Fried interactive mathematics
UTAH - graphics (hidden line removal)
Crocker recounts that the reason for selecting these particular four sites was because they were
“existing ARPA computer science research contractors.” This was important because “the research
community could be counted on to take some initiative.”25

The very first site to receive an IMP was UCLA. Professor Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA was
involved with much of the early development of the ARPANET. His work in queuing theory gave
him a basis to develop measurement techniques used to monitor the ARPANET’s performance. This
made it natural to make sure that UCLA received one of the first nodes as it would be important to
measure the network’s activity from early on. In order for the statistics to have correct data and for
analysis purposes – one of the first two or three sites had to be the measurement site. Sure enough,
UCLA was assigned to be the Network Measurement Center (NMC).26

Part II: The Network Working Group

Once the initial sites were picked, representatives from each site gathered together to start
talking about solving the technical problem of getting the hosts to communicate with each other. The
ARPANET Completion Report tells us about this beginning: “To provide the hosts with a little
impetus to work on the host-to-host problems. ARPA assigned Elmer Shapiro of SRI ‘to make
something happen’, a typically vague ARPA assignment. Shapiro called a meeting in the summer
of 1968 which was attended by programmers from several of the first hosts to be connected to the
network. Individuals who were present have said that it was clear from the meeting at that time, no
one had even any clear notions of what the fundamental host-to-host issues might be.”27

This group, which came to be known as the Network Working Group (NWG), was exploring
new territory. The first meeting took place several months before the first IMP was configured. The
group had to think from a blank slate. In Crocker’s recollections of the important developments
produced by the NWG provided as the introduction to RFC-1000, the reader is reminded that the
thinking involved was groundbreaking and thus exciting. Crocker remembers that the first meeting
was chaired by Elmer Shapiro of SRI, who initiated the conversation with a list of questions.28 Also
present at this first meeting were Steve Carr from the University of Utah, Stephen Crocker from

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UCLA, Jeff Rulifson from SRI, and Ron Stoughton from UCSB. These attendees, most of them
graduate students, were the programmers described in the ARPANET Completion Report.

According to Crocker, this was a seminal meeting. The attendees could only be theoretical,
as none of the lowest levels of communication had been developed yet. They needed a transport layer
or low-level communications platform to build upon. BBN would not deliver the first IMP until
August 30, 1969. It was important to meet before this date, as the NWG “imagined all sorts of
possibilities.”29 Only once their thought processes started could this working group actually develop
anything. These fresh thoughts from fresh minds helped to incubate new ideas. The ARPANET
Completion Report properly acknowledges what this early group helped accomplish. “Their early
thinking was at a very high level.”30 A concrete decision of the first meeting was to continue holding
meetings similar to the first one. This wound up setting the precedent of holding exchange meetings
at each of their sites.

Crocker, describing the problems facing these networking pioneers, writes: “With no specific
service definition in place for what the IMPs were providing to the hosts, there wasn’t any clear idea
of what work the hosts had to do. Only later did we articulate the notion of building a layered set of
protocols with general transport services on the bottom and multiple application-specific protocols
on the top. More precisely, we understood quite early that we wanted quite a bit of generality, but
we didn’t have a clear idea how to achieve it. We struggled between a grand design and getting
something working quickly.”31

The initial protocol development led to DEL (Decode-Encode-Language) and NIL (Network
Interchange Language). These languages were more advanced than what was needed or possible at
the time. The basic purpose was to form an on-the-fly description that would tell the receiving end
how to understand the information that would be sent. This first set of meetings were extremely
abstract as neither ARPA nor the universities had conceived of any official charter. However, the
lack of a specific charter allowed the group to think broadly and openly.

BBN did provide details about the host-IMP interface specifications from the IMP side. This
information gave the group some definite starting points to build from. Soon after BBN provided
more information, on Valentine's Day, 1969, members of the NWG, members of BBN and members
of the Network Analysis Corporation (NAC) met for the first time. The NAC had been invited
because it had been contracted by ARPA to specify the topological design of the ARPANET and to
analyze its cost, performance, and reliability characteristics.32 As all the parties had different
priorities in mind, the meeting was a difficult one. BBN was interested in the lowest level of making
a reliable connection. The programmers from the host sites were interested in getting the hosts to
communicate with each either via various higher level programs. Even when the crew from BBN did
not turn out to be the “experts from the East,” members of the NWG still expected that “a
professional crew would show up eventually to take over the problems we were dealing with.”

A step of great importance which began the open documentation process occurred as a result
of a “particularly delightful” meeting that took place a month later in Utah. The participants decided

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it was time to start recording their meetings in a consistent fashion. What resulted was a set of
informal notes titled “Request for Comments,” (RFC). Stephen Crocker writes about their formation:
“I remember having great fear that we would offend whomever the official protocol designers were,
and I spent a sleepless night composing humble words for our notes. The basic ground rules were
that anyone could say anything and that nothing was official. And to emphasize the point, I labeled
the notes ‘Request for Comments.’ I never dreamed these notes would be distributed through the
very medium we were discussing in these notes. Talk about Sorcerer’s Apprentice!”33

Crocker replaced Shapiro as the Chairman of the NWG soon after the initial meeting. He
describes how they wrestled with the creation of the host-host protocols: “Over the spring and
summer of 1969 we grappled with the detailed problems of protocol design. Although we had a
vision of the vast potential for inter-computer communication, designing usable protocols was
another matter. A custom hardware interface and custom intrusion into the operating system was
going to be required for anything we designed, and we anticipated serious difficulty at each of the
sites. We looked for existing abstractions to use. It would have been convenient if we could have
made the network simply look like a tape drive to each host, but we knew that wouldn’t do.”34

The first IMP was delivered to UCLA in late August, 1969. The next was delivered to SRI
a month later in October.35 Once more than one IMP existed, the NWG had to implement a working
communications protocol. This first set of pairwise host protocols included remote login for
interactive use (telnet), and a way to copy files between remote hosts (FTP). Crocker writes: “In
particular, only asymmetric, user-server relationships were supported. In December 1969, we met
with Larry Roberts in Utah, [and he] made it abundantly clear that our first step was not big enough,
and we went back to the drawing board. Over the next few months we designed a symmetric
host-host protocol, and we defined an abstract implementation of the protocol known as the Network
Control Program. (‘NCP’ later came to be used as the name for the protocol, but it originally meant
the program within the operating system that managed connections. The protocol itself was known
blandly only as the host-host protocol.) Along with the basic host-host protocol, we also envisioned
a hierarchy of protocols, with Telnet, FTP and some splinter protocols as the first examples. If we
had only consulted the ancient mystics, we would have seen immediately that seven layers were
required.”36

The Network Working Group went on to develop the protocols necessary to make the
network viable. The group swelled in attendance as more and more sites connected to the
ARPANET. The group became large enough (around 100 people) that one meeting was held in
conjunction with the 1971 Spring Joint Computer Conference in Atlantic City. A major test of the
NWG’s work came in October 1971, when a meeting was held at MIT. Crocker continues the story:
“[A] major protocol ‘fly-off’ – Representatives from each site were on hand, and everyone tried to
log in to everyone else’s site. With the exception of one site that was completely down, the matrix
was almost completely filled in, and we had reached a major milestone in connectivity.”37

The NCP was creating what was called the “host to host protocol.” Explaining why this was
important, the authors of the ARPA draft write: “The problem is to design a host protocol which is

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sufficiently powerful for the kinds of communication that will occur and yet can be implemented in
all of the various different host computer systems. The initial approach taken involved an entity
called a “Network Control Program” which would typically reside in the executive of a host, such
that processes within a host would communicate with the network through this Network Control
Program. The primary function of the NCP is to establish connections, break connections, switch
connections, and control flow. A layered approach was taken such that more complex procedures
(such as File Transfer Procedures) were built on top of similar procedures in the host Network
Control Program.”38

As the ARPANET grew, the number of users bypassed the number of developers. This
signaled the success of these networking pioneers. Steve Crocker appointed Alex McKenzie and Jon
Postel to replace him as Chairmen of the Network Working Group. The Completion Report details
how this role changed: “McKenzie and Postel interpreted their task to be one of codification and
coordination primarily, and after a few more spurts of activity the protocol definition process settled
for the most part into a status of a maintenance effort.”39

ARPA was a management body which funded academic computer scientists. ARPA’s
funding paved the way for these scientists to create the ARPANET. BBN helped by developing the
packet switching techniques which served as the bottom level of transmitting information between
sites. The NWG provided an important development in its “Request for Comments” documentation
which made possible the developing new protocols.

Part III: About RFC’s as “Open” Documentation

The open exchange of ideas initiated from the very first meeting of the Network Working
Group was continued in the Request For Comments. As meeting notes, the RFC’s were meant to
keep members updated on the status of various developments and ideas. They were also meant to
gather responses from people. RFC-3, “Documentation Conventions,” documents the “rules”
governing the production of these notes. Heading RFC-3 are the open distribution rules:
“Documentation of the NWG’s effort is through notes such as this. Notes may be produced at any
site by anybody and included in this series.”40 These opening sentences invite anyone willing to be
helpful into the protocol definition process. This is important because all restrictions are lifted by
these words, allowing for the open process aimed for. The guide goes on to describe the rules
concerning the contents of the RFC’s: “The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion,
etc. related to the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely
rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific
suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explication, and
explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG
note is one sentence.”41 In RFC-3, Crocker continues to explain the philosophy behind the perhaps
unprecedented openness represented: “These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two
reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative, and we hope
to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there
is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition.”42
[The entire RFC-3 is reproduced in the Appendix.]

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This open process encouraged and led to the exchange of information. Technical development is only
successful when information is allowed to flow freely and easily between the parties involved.
Encouraging participation is the main principle that made the development of the Net possible.

Statements like the ones contained in RFC-3 are democratic in their support of a process of
openness. They were written during the late 1960s, a time of popular protest for freedom of speech.
People were demanding more of a say in how their countries were run. The open environment
needed to develop new technologies is consistent with the cry for more democracy which students
and others were raising during the 1960s throughout the world. What is amazing is the collaboration
of the NWG (mostly graduate students) and ARPA (a component of the military) during the 1960s
and 1970s. This seems unusual given the context of the times, e.g., the student anti-war movement.
Robert Braden of the Internet Activities Board reflects on this collaboration: “For me, participation
in the development of the ARPAnet and the Internet protocols has been very exciting. One important
reason it worked, I believe, is that there were a lot of very bright people all working more or less in
the same direction, led by some very wise people in the funding agency. The result was to create a
community of network researchers who believed strongly that collaboration is more powerful than
competition among researchers. I don’t think any other model would have gotten us where we are
today.”43 Such collaboration is why the work of these computer scientists led to such an amazing and
democratic achievements, the Net and the cooperative culture of the Net.”44

Calling these notes a “Request for Comment” established a fascinating tradition. It predates
the Usenet post, which in a fashion could also be called a “request for comment.” Both are the
presentation of a particular person’s ideas, questions or comments to the general public for
comments, criticism or suggestions. Early RFC’s established this tradition. Many RFC’s are in fact
comments on previous RFC”s.45

Part IV: Conclusion

How were the developments of the ARPANET made possible? None of the participants had
previous solutions to any of the problems and tasks that they faced to establish a working packet
switched test bed with host to host connectivity. They had to put much thought and work into their
research. As the resulting ARPANET was tremendously successful and fulfilled the objectives of
the project ARPA presented, it is important to see what can be learned from the research and
research methods from which it emerged. Bernie Cosell, who worked at BBN during this early
period, describes the importance of an open process in a developmental situation: “*no*one* had
the necessary expertise [and vision] to figure any of this out on their own. The cultures among the
early groups were VERY different [– ] multics, sigma-7, IBM …at Rand, …PDP-10s at BBN and
SRI… [and possibly] UCSB and Utah had pdp-10's, too. The pie-in-the-sky applications ranged over
a WIDE landscape, with no one knowing quite where it would lead. Some kind of free, cross-cultural
info/idea exchange *had* to happen.”46

The computer scientists and others involved were encouraged in their work by ARPA’s
philosophy of gathering the best computer scientists working in the field and supporting them: “IPT
usually does little day-to-day management of its contractors. Especially with its research contracts,

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IPT would not be producing faster results with such management as research must progress at its
own pace. IPT has generally adopted a mode of management which entails finding highly motivated,
highly skilled contractors, giving them a task, and allowing them to proceed by themselves.”47

The work of the Network Working Group was vital to the development of the ARPANET.
Vinton Cerf, another of the graduate students involved with the early protocol development and still
closely connected to the Internet, echoed this sentiment when he opened his paper “An Assessment
of ARPANET Protocols,” by writing: “The history of the Advanced Research Project Agency
resource sharing computer network (ARPANET) is in many ways a history of the study,
development, and implementation of protocols.”48 Cerf supports Cosell’s opinion about the
uncertainty and newness of the entire project: “The tasks facing the ARPANET design teams were
often unclear, and frequently required agreements which had never been contemplated before (e.g.,
common protocols to permit different operating systems and hardware to communicate). The success
of the effort, seen in retrospect, is astonishing, and much credit is due to those who were willing to
commit themselves to the job of putting the ARPANET together.49

The NWG’s work blazed the trail which the developers of the TCP/IP suite of protocols
(Transport Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) successfully followed when the need to expand and
include other networks based on other technologies than NCP arose. The principles embodied by
RFC-3 and the open RFC documentation process provided a strong foundation which began with
NCP and was continued by the work on TCP/IP. NCP was developed in the field and versions of it
were released early in its development so various programmers could work on implementing and
improving the protocol. In addition all specifications were free and easily available for people to
examine and comment on. Through this principle of early release, the problems and kinks were
found and worked out in a timely manner. The future developers of TCP/IP learned from the
developers of NCP a practice of developing from the bottom up. The bottom-up model allows for
a wide-range of people and experiences to join in and perfect the protocol and make it the best
possible.

The public funding of the ARPANET project meant that the documentation could be made
public and freely available. The documentation was neither restricted nor classified. This open
process encouraging communication was necessary for these pioneers to succeed. Research in new
fields of study requires that researchers cooperate and communicate in order to share their expertise.
Such openness is especially critical when no one person has the answers in advance. In his article,
“The Evolution of Packet Switching,” Larry Roberts described the public nature of the process:
“Since the ARPANET was a public project connecting many major universities and research
institutions, the implementation and performance details were widely published.”50

The people at the forefront of development of these protocols were the members of the
Network Working Group, many of whom came from academic institutions, and who therefore had
the support and time needed for the research. In summing up the achievements of the process that
developed the ARPANET, the ARPANET Completion Report Draft explains: “The ARPANET
development was an extremely intense activity in which contributions were made by many of the

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best computer scientists in the United States. Thus, almost all of the “major technical problems”
already mentioned received continuing attention and the detailed approach to those problems
changed several times during the early years of the ARPANET effort.”51

Fundamental to the ARPANET, as explained by the Completion Report, was the discovery
of a new way of looking at computers. The developers of the ARPANET viewed the computer as
a communications device rather than only as an arithmetic device.52 This new view made the
building of the ARPANET possible. This view came from the research conducted by those in
academic computer science. Such a shift in understanding the role of the computer is fundamental
to advancing computer science. The ARPANET research has provided a rich legacy for the further
advancement of computer science and it is important that the significant lessons learned be studied
and used to further advance the study of computer science.

Notes for Chapter 7

1. Chapter III, p. 132, Section 2.3.4, ARPANET Completion Report, F. Heart, A. McKenzie, J. McQuillan, D. Walden,
Washington, D.C., 1978. (Hereafter, ARPANET Completion Report)

2. ARPANET Completion Report Draft, September 9, 1977, unpublished, p. III-6. (Hereafter, Completion Report Draft)

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. III-7.

5. Interview by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, Tape recording, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 28 October 1988,
OH 150, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

6. Completion Report Draft, p. III-7.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. IlII-21.

9. See for example J. C. R Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” In Memoriam:
J. C. R. Licklider 1915-1990, Digital Research Center, Palo Alto, Califirnia, August 7, 1990; originally published in
Science and Technology, April, 1968.

10. Completion Report Draft, p. III-23

11. Ibid., p. III-24.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. David Clark, RFC-1336.

15. See Chapter 8 “The Birth and Development of the ARPANET.” Also, see F. Heart, A. McKenzie, J. McQuillan, D.

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Walden, ARPANET Completion Report, Washington, D.C., 1978, Chapter III, section 1.1.2, starting on page III-9.

16. Completion Report Draft, pp. III-25 and III-26.

17. ARPANET Completion Report, p. II-8.

18. Completion Report Draft, p. III-32.

19. Ibid., p. III-35 and ARPANET Completion Report, p. II-2.

20. Completion Report Draft, p. III-35.

21. Ibid., p. III-67.

22. Ibid., p. III-39 and personal discussion with Alex McKenzie, November 1, 1993.

23. E-mail message to Com-Priv mailing list ([email protected]) Subject “Re: RFC1000 (Partial response to part 1)”
Date: Nov 27, 1993.

24. Vinton G. Cerf, private e-mail corespondence, dated Nov 27, 1993. Subject: “Re: Early Days of the ARPANET and
the NWG”.

25. “The Origins of RFC’s” by Stephen D. Crocker, is contained in RFC-1000 by J. Reynolds and J. Postel, p. 1.

26. The following quotes show some of the reasoning that went into the choice of the initial ARPANET sites.

“CCN’s [The Campus Computing Network of UCLA’s] chance to obtain a connection to the ARPANET was a result
of the presence at UCLA of Professor L. Kleinrock and his students, including S. Crocker, J. Postel, and V. Cerf. This
group was not only involved in the original design of the network and the Host protocols, but also was to operate the
Network Measurement Center (NMC). For these reasons the first delivered IMP was installed at UCLA, and ARPA
was thus able to easily offer CCN the opportunity for connection.” (Completion Report Draft, p. III - 689)

“UCLA was specifically asked to take on the task of a ‘Network Measurement Center’ with the objective of studying
the performance of the network as it was built, grown, and modified; SRI was specifically asked to take on the task
of a ‘Network Information Center’ with the objective of collecting information about the network, about host
resources, and at the same time generating computer based tools for storing and accessing that collected information.
(Completion Report Draft, p. II-16)

“The accessibility of distributed resources carries with it the need for an information service (either centralized or
distributed) that enables users to learn about those resources. This was recognized at the PI [ed. Primary Instigators]
meeting in Michigan in the spring of 1967. At the time, Doug Engelbart and his group at the Stanford Research
Institute were already involved in research and development to provide a computer-based facility to augment human
interaction. Thus, it was decided that Stanford Research Institute would be a suitable place for a ‘Network Information
Center’ (NIC) to be established for the ARPANET. With the beginning of implementation of the network in 1969,
construction also began on the NIC at SRI.” (Completion Report Draft, p. III-60)

27. Completion Report Draft, p. III-67.

28. E-mail message to Com-Priv mailing list

Subject: “Re: RFC1000 (End of response to part 1)”
Date: Nov 27, 1993.

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29. RFC-1000.

30. Completion Report Draft, p. III-67.

31. E-mail message to Com-Priv mailing list

Subject “Subject: Re: RFC1000 (Response to part 2)”
Date: Nov 27, 1993.

32. Completion Report Draft, p. III-30.

33. RFC-1000, p. 3.

34. Ibid.

35. In RFC-1000, Stephen Crocker reports on the process of the installation of the first IMP.

“[T]ime was pressing: The first IMP was due to be delivered to UCLA September 1, 1969, and the rest were
scheduled at monthly intervals.

At UCLA we scrambled to build a host-IMP interface. SDS, the builder of the Sigma 7, wanted many months and
many dollars to do the job.

Mike Wingfield, another grad student at UCLA, stepped in and offered to get the interface built in six weeks for a
few thousand dollars. He had a gorgeous, fully instrumented interface working in five and one half weeks. I was in
charge of the software, and we were naturally running a bit late. September 1 was Labor Day, so I knew I had a couple
of extra days to debug the software. Moreover, I had heard BBN was having some timing troubles with the software,
so I had some hope they'd miss the ship date. And I figured that first some Honeywell people would install the
hardware – IMPs were built out of Honeywell 516s in those days – and then BBN people would come in a few days
later to shake down the software. An easy couple of weeks of grace.

BBN fixed their timing trouble, air shipped the IMP, and it arrived on our loading dock on Saturday, August 30. They
arrived with the IMP, wheeled it into our computer room, plugged it in and the software restarted from where it had
been when the plug was pulled in Cambridge. Still Saturday, August 30. Panic time at UCLA.

The second IMP was delivered to SRI at the beginning of October, and ARPA’s interest was intense. Larry Roberts
and Barry Wessler came by for a visit on November 21, and we actually managed to demonstrate a Telnet-like
connection to SRI.”

36. RFC-1000, p. 4.

37. Ibid.

38. Completion Report Draft, p. II-24.

39. Completion Report Draft, p. III-69.

40. RFC-3, p.1.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

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43. RFC-1336

44. This democratic community is in danger of being fundamentally altered. This study of the history of the development
of the ARPANET in conjunction with Chapter 2, “The Social Forces Behind the Development of Usenet News” are
meant to help people understand where the Net has come from, in order to defend it, and try to fight to keep it open and
democratic – “the seventh wonder of the world” as a recent ad called the Internet.

45. Some examples of comments upon comments include:

RFC-1 Crocker, S. Host software 1969 April 7

RFC-65 Walden, D. Comments on Host/Host Protocol document #1

RFC-36 Crocker, S. Protocol notes 1970 March 16

RFC-38 Wolfe, S. Comments on network protocol from NWG/RFC #36
RFC-39 Harslem, E.; Heafner, J. Comments on protocol re: NWG/RFC#36

RFC-33 Crocker, S. New Host-Host Protocol 1970 February 12

RFC-47 Crowther, W. BBN’s comments on NWG/RFC #33 1970 April 20

46, Bernie Cosell, “Re: RFC1000 – Questions about the origins of ARPANET Protocols 2/2,” alt.folklore.computers,
Nov. 23, 1993.

47. Completion Report Draft, p. III-47.

48. Vinton Cerf, “An Assessment of ARPANET Protocols,” Infotech Education Ltd., Stanford University, California

49. Ibid.

50. Lawrence Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 66, no. 11, November 1978,
p. 267.

51. ARPANET Completion Report, p. II-24.

52. Completion Report Draft, p. III-24.

Special thanks to Alexander McKenzie of BBN, Stephen Crocker of TIS, and Vinton Cerf of CNRI for making research
materials available.

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