@lukasikWhyArpanetWas2011
[!info] - Cite Key: @lukasikWhyArpanetWas2011 - Link: IEEE Xplore Full Text PDF - Abstract: The who, what, when, and how of the Arpanet is usually told in heroic terms—Licklider's vision, the fervor of his disciples, the dedication of computer scientists and engineers, the work of graduate students, and so forth. Told by one of the key actors in this salient part of US and Internet history, this article addresses why the Arpanet was built. - Bibliography: Lukasik, S. 2011 Why the Arpanet Was Built. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33(3): 4–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2010.11. - Tags: #ARPA, #ARPANET, #collaborative-computing, #Command-and-control-systems, #Communication-systems, #Computer-vision, #Department-of-Defense, #history-of-computing, #Internet, #Military-aircraft, #Military-computing, #networking, #Nuclear-weapons, #Research-and-development
Annotations¶
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Imported on 2023-04-02 2:24 pm¶
Relevant / important¶
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Told by one of the key actors in this salient part of US and Internet history, this article addresses why the Arpanet was built
Page 1 [[2023-03-28#12:45 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Writing from the viewpoint of the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet’s development, in this article, I detail the rationale for investing US Department of Defense resources for research and development of the first operational packet-switched network
the how
Page 1 [[2023-03-28#12:46 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Radar data would be digitized, transmitted over telephone lines, and analyzed by the new digital computers being developed.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The result of this effort was the SemiAutomatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight It sought results that redefined how one looked at the problems it tackledgame-changing solutions to what today are called ‘‘DARPA-hard’’ problems. Modest evolutionary improvements were left to others
Page 3 [[2023-03-29#5:52 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight and creating an interdisciplinary science of materials from the separate disciplines of physics, chemistry, metallurgy, ceramics, and engineering. Shorter-term efforts were in solid propellant chemistry, energy conversion, Presidential protection following the Kennedy assassination, and other matters that drew on its contracting lexibility, speed, expertise, and innovative approaches.
The amount of interconnectivity it took to create Arpanet is astonisihig. taking so many highly trained individuals.
Page 3 [[2023-03-29#5:53 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight the events I recount here.5 Following the agency’s establishment in 1958 as the presumed savior of dysfunctional US national space efforts in the DoD, it was decided that the US national space effort should not be lodged in the DoD.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight By this time, the White House was having second thoughts after ARPA’s first director, Roy Johnson, publicly disagreed with it over the civil space decision.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The joint chiefs of staff (JCS), reflecting this position, opposed the agency’s formation.
Arpanet oposition
Page 4 [[2023-03-31#10:15 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Now the services returned to the attack with renewed vigor, arguing that ARPA was never intended to be a permanent agency, but simply a now-completed transitional phase in the reorganization of US space efforts in response to the Soviet satellite launch.
Page 4 [[2023-03-31#10:15 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight SDC found itself not only with a spare computer, but also with a decreasing role in air defense software development fortheAirForce.Sotheproblemofthe large valuable surplus computer, its software,andthepeopletorunitwasturned over to ARPA to address OSD’s system requirements needs.
Page 4 [[2023-03-31#10:17 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight tensions that persist to the present emerged
Page 4 [[2023-03-31#10:17 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight It collapsed when UCLA decided not to renew the basic WDPC contract with IBM.
setback
Page 5 [[2023-04-01#1:51 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight To Lick, ‘‘network’’ had three meanings: the network ofhardware,wires,andsoftware;themanmachine network, where each performed functions for which each was best equipped to reach a larger goal; and the network of people, with their skills, experiences, and information resources that could be focused on larger cognitive goals requiring interaction to [3B2-9] man2011030004.3d 27/7/011 16:26 Page 8 Why the Arpanet Was Built 8 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Authorized licensed use limited to: Carleton University. Downloaded on March 22,2023 at 18:52:55 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight solve problems too large or complex for an individual.
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Accelerating forces other than military
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight they would likely have objected to so fundamental an intrusion into the essence of their missions.
The military wanted complete control of how they did things, if they started using tech and information
Page 6 [[2023-04-01#2:11 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight When Lick left ARPA at the end of 1964, the integrated character of the original command and control program was lost and the Behavioral Science Command and Control Research office was divided in two. The information technology side of command and control stayed with the now-renamed IPT office, while the behavioral charter shifted to an independent Behavioral Science Office. The latter office did not initially focus on decision making.
Page 6 [[2023-04-01#2:13 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Later, when the office did focus on decision making, it was in decision theory. An early application supported political negotiations for transfer of the Panama Canal from US to Panamanian sovereignty.
This seems like a nice way of saying "researching manipulation tactics." This is a very prevalent in today's world as many tech companies know how to manipulate us into spending more time on their app and even spending money on them.
Page 6 [[2023-04-01#2:15 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight he ninth report on security, secrecy, and tamper-free considerations addresses architectural issues of network security—deficiencies in the Internet we are only now coming to regret. As a high-water mark in thwarting malicious users, Baran notes that his system ‘‘assumes a potential infiltration by enemy agents having access to portions of the system and the cryptographic keybases.’
(Can relate back to crpytography stuff).
Network security is a really big issue in the field of tech that is ever evolving to fight hackers and malicious software. This is important because if government networks are not secure a hacker can easily hack into this network and shut down the system completely. This would cause even a large country like the US to go into a panic while it figured out what was going on.Page 7 [[2023-04-01#2:19 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Len Kleinrock, a graduate student in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. In his May 1961 PhD thesis proposal, ‘‘Information Flow in Large Communication Nets,’’16,[P] he examined questions of scalability, performance evaluation, control, routing, and related issues in distributed networks.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The next step in realizing Lick’s vision occurred when Bob Taylor joined the agency from NASA in 1965.
It is very clear that Lick was a major factor in the rise of ARPA.
Page 7 [[2023-04-01#2:25 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight time-sharing; flexible and convenient interaction with computers through text, graphics, pointing, and handwriting; and artificial intelligence
The main needs for the ARPA systems to really take off.
Page 7 [[2023-04-01#2:27 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight IPT directors added language, speech, and image understanding to the mix that enabled the power of computers to expand into tasks where humans could be augmented or replaced.
The first time computers do not need to rely on humans. The beginning of a world where many jobs can be replaced by computers.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight For this, he recruited Larry Roberts. Roberts was at Lincoln Laboratory where, in June 1966, he was working on an implementation of networking, a packet connection between the TX–2 computer at Lincoln Laboratory, and a Q32/PDP–1 computer at SDC in Santa Monica.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Baran was one contributor, bringing not only his team’s technical contributions from his earlier work on digital networks but highlighting the importance of the survivability of defense communication networks under severe stress.
The pooling of minds like this is similar to Bell Labs (can make a note on Bell labs). The need to break up labor into multiple specialized groups is nothing that has been seen before (link to chappe and morse how it was a pair that made those).
Page 8 [[2023-04-01#2:34 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight n fairness to the voice-circuitoriented communication industry at the time, packet switching did seem to require substantial overhead in software, computing time, and the use of a number of different computers (managed by separate organizations), as well as a dismaying number of interfaces to navigate to transmit a single ASCII character.
A big challenge for the IMPS, the ability to communicate with different computers made by different companies without sharing in mind.
Page 8 [[2023-04-01#2:39 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight This was what led to the first Arpanet configuration, the UCLA–SRI–UCSBUtah net.
The very first internet, a connection of computers.
Page 9 [[2023-04-01#2:51 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight A 1974 Mitre study of Arpanet usage showed that about three-quarters of the traffic was email.
This is an early sign that computers would be very good for consumers.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight IPT’s next step was to break the tether to fixed locations defined by the telephone system
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The DDR&E decided to augment the Army’s technical capability by transferring ARPA’s Defender program, including current funding and staff, to the Army Ballistic Missile Defense Agency.
ARPA setback
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight if approved at all, in a system that would likely have been late and over-budget, the same concerns that dissuaded Baran and the Air Force in 1965 from utilizing DCA to construct their proposed message-block system.
Page 11 [[2023-04-01#3:19 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight LASA and NORSAR recorded signals from nuclear events in the USSR
Farming data from the USS
Page 12 [[2023-04-01#3:24 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight A new London–Norway link was needed to connect to the now expanded Norway–Washington link, but the tariff proposed by the carriers acting under the umbrella International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Commission (CCITT) was beyond any possible budget provision.
The governements are trying to squeeze every last penny out of everything.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The first packet was transmitted from UCL to the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) in Marina del Rey on 25 July 1973.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Absent the subsequent metamorphosis of the Arpanet into today’s Internet, the story of the ARPA experiment would be a footnote in a technical history of military command and control. But because of its evolution into a public-access service based on the same technology and protocols, the Arpanet development process deserves comment.
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[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight ARPA contractor community worked because the partners were moderately homogeneous in their level of knowledge and their willingness to cooperate with one another.
The sense of community that led to many major technological advancements is something we have not seen before with anything in the past.
Page 14 [[2023-04-02#12:25 pm]]
Agree¶
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making
The primary factor accelerating the arpanet was military needs, with the cold war still being in effect the US wanted every advantage they could get over the USSR.
Page 1 [[2023-03-28#12:47 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight At the very beginning, networks of people (US friends and foreign adversaries) provided assistance and pressure to succeed
Different from the telegraph, the telegraph was something that was used selfishly, not letting other nations use it. While Arpanet was developed with contribution.
Page 1 [[2023-03-28#12:50 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight In 1948, the Air Force had already studied the need for an air defense early-warning network of radar stations and had an 85-station network of limited capability underway
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The urgency of US air defense increased when North Korea invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950 and when China intervened on 26 November of that year, thus bringing the specter of nuclear war with the communist world even closer.
Increasing the need for development of arpanet.
Page 2 [[2023-03-28#12:57 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight If the USSR could launch satellites of that size, they could also deliver missiles armed with nuclear warheads to the US.
More fear struck because of the war.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight A contemporary perspective on timesharing was that the speed of computers was so great compared to the speed with which people think that they could be shared, apparently simultaneously, among several users. But users could only interact with data in their host computer and only with other people at their same institution who were connected to that computer.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight One exploratory effort at UCLA looked into networking separate computers to function as a virtual parallel processor.
The ideas of trying to link up all these computers to each other is pretty much a server.
Page 5 [[2023-04-01#1:29 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Sutherland had replaced Lick as director of IPT. A noteworthy feature of Sutherland’s thinking was that the network was to be robust, on the ground that a DoD-like network should be able to ‘‘survive a bombing raid.’’
The Cold War is still a major factor in their decisions, with how they build things and where.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The Air Force recognized the need to enlist the US scientific and technical community.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight RAND did, however, continue technology efforts such as a pen tablet and handwriting recognition to facilitate manmachine interaction
HCI
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Under the Defense Reorganization Act of 1949, the Defense Communication Agency (DCA), not the Air Force, had the responsibility of developing, deploying, and managing DoD communication systems. DCA at that time was unfamiliar with digital technology. It was assisted by AT&T, a major provider of communication services and deeply committed to analog voice circuits and their switching. The Air Force decided giving the Baran/RAND proposal to DCA for implementation was a plan for disaster and the proposal was withdrawn.
Politics getting in the way. This text makes this system seem like a good thing but due to politics only the DCA could manage communication systems, which this new system was way to complex for so they could never manage it. Leading to the dropping of a good technology.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Baran’s work is impressive for the scope of the design specifications.
Clearly Baran could have made a big impact in the history of the internet.
Page 7 [[2023-04-01#2:23 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Packet switching was new and radical in the 1960s. In order to plan to spend millions of dollars and stake my reputation, I needed to understand that it would work. Without Kleinrock’s work on Networks and Queuing Theory, I could never have taken such a radical step. All the communications community argued that it couldn’t work. This [Kleinrock’s] book was critical to my standing up to them and betting that it would work.
We have seen this before, one person who dedicates their time to research something that no one cares about leads to others joining in and finding a real profitable use case for it.
Page 8 [[2023-04-01#2:36 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Although the need for survivable networks had not changed, political forces were tightening the screws on ARPA. The agency’s budget was shrinking, partly to help pay for the Vietnam War and partly because opponents to the war in the Congress were using every opportunity to cut DoD programs. ‘‘Fraud, waste, and abuse’’ was a frequently invoked litany of sins. Lack of relevance to national security was another.
More politics at play. The government wants to stay in power so they would rather spend the money on something that can be immediately used for publicity like the Vietnam War. 1968 was also the president election year so the parties wanted to do whatever they could to boost their popularity, spending on research that may take years to get any results is not going to win them votes short-term.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Too little risk and the task could be left to others, but too much and perhaps it was a poor investment of limited funds.
The impossible question to answer, the sweet spot of risk and reward.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The first node was at UCLA, where Kleinrock was now on the faculty, to provide a capability to measure network performance and to test his ideas on packet delay and network congestion. The other three nodes similarly made important contributions to the four-node test network
Each node was picked because it could do something the others could not. These computers were expensive so instead of building one of each at each university it is more economically viable to find a way to connect them so the universities could share resources.
Page 9 [[2023-04-01#2:52 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight At a time when every calculation had to be programmed for a specific computer, the early belief was that users would send their input data to the site best able to handle it.
Instead of each site wasting precious time reconfiguring a machine every time they needed to do a different calculation it would make sense to have machines preconfigured and sending out requests using the network to do calculations.
Page 10 [[2023-04-01#3:03 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight internetwork protocols.
Standardization with protocols has many other benefits, it makes it simple for someone to hop from one system to another. It also makes it easier for new comers to create technology for these systems because they only need to make sure it works for the protocols so it can work with a vast range of devices.
Page 10 [[2023-04-01#3:06 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Beyond addressing ballistic missile defense and OSD’s perception of the agency’s value, the Defender program transfer underlined a need for its staff to shift some of its attention from the input stage, formulating new programs to address new problems and threats and managing high-quality projects, to the output stage, moving their results to those who could use them
Since computers have started to mature they are able to focus less on making the computers work and how they transfer data to the applications of what computers can do. They now need to prove that these computers have real uses.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight There were no purely operational users who cared only about the quality and reliability of the service.
It is sad how these people only care about inventing the next big thing to come into the spotlight. A big part of networks is them being reliable for the corporations that use them. This is a lot more important today, like the recent rogers service interuption. It only lasted a couple of days but costed many companies millions of dollars because they couldn't communicate with their clients.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The flexibility of email for management traffic and creating records of transactions was appealing, not simply to boost networking but because it worked better than what we had: seven-ply carbon paper, copiers, phones, and snail mail.
On demand records
Page 11 [[2023-04-01#3:21 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight This ARPA program, Vela, was to provide data that US policy makers could use in negotiations for a treaty banning all nuclear weapon tests.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight New bureaucratic problems surfaced, which Peter Kirstein reports on in detail.36 Although the technical issues proved to be tractable, the regulatory and political roadblocks were more persistent, overcome only after considerable delays.
This is now a big poltical issue of how to handle communication between Nations.
Page 12 [[2023-04-01#3:26 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Another complication arose when the Scandinavian Tanum satellite ground station came online, which allowed the retrieval of NORSAR data at 50 kilobits per second (Kbps) for the first time. This upgrade of bandwidth obviated further need for the 9.6-Kbps cable line that passed through London en route to Norway.
Page 12 [[2023-04-01#3:27 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Kirstein explains that because of the policy to favor European over US links, it was necessary to shift the UK–Arpanet connection from NPL to University College London (UCL)
Page 13 [[2023-04-01#3:28 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Neither will heads of state forgo the intelligence-collection opportunities it provides, nor will military services abandon the precision of cyberweapons that can be directed against national infrastructures and other military targets.
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Definitions / concepts¶
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight Over the next 10 years, ARPA developed a modus operandi that still distinguishes it from other parts of the federal government.
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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight the Great Intergalactic Network
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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight was being explored by a number of people in different places but was not yet fully articulated.7,8 This combination of motives, interactive cognition, and management efficiency persisted through the Information Processing Techniques (IPT) program in different areas.
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[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight net-centric warfare
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Questions / confusion¶
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Jack Ruina hired J.C.R. Licklider (Lick) in October 1962 to run the program.[N] A psychologist working on human factors in WWII, a participant in the Project Charles study that laid out the conceptual foundations for the SAGE networked air defense system, a professor of psychoacoustics at MIT, and a computer researcher at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) before going to ARPA, Lick saw the command and control problem as having two parts: the machine processing of information and the presenting of that information to humans in a form suitable for use in making decisions.
I think Lick is a very important person throughout the history of ARPA.
Page 4 [[2023-04-01#2:26 pm]]
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Paul Baran joined the organization in 1959 from Hughes Aircraft
Page 7 [[2023-04-01#2:16 pm]]
Disagree¶
[!quote|#ff6666] Highlight PT principal investigators either as engineering, not computer science, or a diversion of funds that might be better spent to expand their own, self-evidently more important, areas of research
going back to money. While engineering may be precieved as being better research because it produces tangible things, computer science is still very important. Whats the point of having these tangible computers if there is nothing you can do with them?
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