NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: [Les Earnest] Re: Paul Baran's passing
I think the NY Times did not intend to make that claim. Rather, it was
aiming at the notion that the heart of Paul's work on distributed
communication was based on the same ideas that informed the design of
the ARPANET: packet switching. Paul's design for a resilient, packet
voice command and control system was contemporary with Len Kleinrock's
work on the mathematics of packet switching in his Ph.D. dissertation
topic and with Donald Davies' work at the UK National Physical
Laboratory. Davies coined the use of the term "packet" to refer to
addressed chunks of data.
While the designers of the ARPANET did not apparently know of Paul's
work until it was brought to their attention after the major design
work was done, it is fair to say that all of these players, including
Paul Baran, appreciated the power of this alternative to traditional
circuit switching.
vint cerf
On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 2:36 AM, Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com> wrote:
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Les Earnest <les@cs.stanford.edu> -----
>
> Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:07:29 -0700
> From: Les Earnest <les@cs.stanford.edu>
> Subject: Paul Baran's passing
>
> I am saddened to learn of Paul Baran's passing (3/28/11 page B4) since he
> has been a long time helpful friend. However I am also dismayed by false
> claims in the New York Times article that Paul played a central role in the
> creation of ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet. I never heard him make
> such a claim but see that others are now trying to rewrite history for some
> reason.
>
> Working at Rand Corporation, Paul did important theoretical work in the
> early 1960s on how to build survivable military communication networks and
> tried to make it happen but was unable to get funding from the Defense
> Department. He initiated a number of later innovations including Ricochet,
> the first public wireless mesh networking system, in 1985.
>
> It appears to me that one source of confusion about networking history is
> that nearly all writings on this topic skip over the first computer
> network, which was part of the SAGE air defense system. SAGE was initiated
> in the early 1950s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and
> also gave the first practical demonstration of interactive computing,
> accomplished by timesharing, which was an essential precursor to ARPAnet.
> Thus ARPAnet was a direct descendant of SAGE and was mostly developed by
> people who came from MIT Lincoln Lab. I note that the Internet is still
> mainly composed of timesharing systems, now called "servers," connected to
> various kinds of terminals, many of which are now so small that they fit in
> your pocket.
>
> SAGE used special purpose packetized networks to gather radar data from a
> hundred and some radar sites across North America and to process it at 23
> large computer centers. SAGE also used land line data links to communicate
> between adjacent sectors and with higher level commands.It used packet
> radio systems to issue guidance commands to manned interceptors and
> ground-to-air missiles in order to intercept incoming bombers. The only
> problem with this technological marvel was that in an actual attack, which
> thankfully never happened, SAGE would have immediately malfunctioned at
> several levels. Nevertheless it was kept going for 25 years at a cost to
> taxpayers of billions of dollars and to the immense profit of the
> military-industrial-political complex. But that is another ongoing story.
>
> J.C.R. Licklider ("Lick" to his friends) helped design the human-computer
> interface for SAGE and subsequently wrote a seminal paper on that topic
> [1]. He also provided financial support for the development of general
> purpose timesharing systems, both while managing projects at Bolt, Beranek,
> and Newman (BBN) and when he later initiated a computer research program at
> ARPA. The first person to advocate general purpose timesharing was MIT
> Prof. John McCarthy [2] and Lick hired him as a consultant at BBN, then
> sponsored the development of a demonstration timesharing system there.
>
> After moving to the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency
> (ARPA) in 1962 Lick funded development of a number of general purpose
> timesharing systems at various universities and subsequently called for the
> development of computer networks that would interconnect such systems,
> which resulted in the ARPAnet, though he did not specify exactly how this
> should be done.
>
> How do I know all this? I was there. I had known Lick since 1949 and
> reconnected when I came to Lincoln Lab in 1956 to help design SAGE. I
> later developed an experimental cursive handwriting recognizer using the
> Lab's TX-2 computer, which I shared on evenings and weekends beginning in
> 1960 with other graduate students including Ivan Sutherland, then working
> on his Sketchpad drawing system, Larry Roberts working on perception of 3D
> objects from photographs, and Len Kleinrock, doing simulations of partly
> connected computer networks. After later being sent to the Headquarters of
> Central Intelligence Agency for a year and two years at the Pentagon
> assisting the Joint Chiefs of Staff I escaped to Stanford University and
> helped John McCarthy set up the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab
> (SAIL). During 1967-68 I was the Stanford representative on the start-up
> committee for ARPAnet, which included about a dozen people.
>
> The principal architect of ARPAnet was Larry Roberts, who had been
> recruited to ARPA from Lincoln Lab. He based his approach to packet
> switching on the analysis in Len Kleinrock's dissertation [3]. Our goals
> had nothing to do with military communications or the survivability
> thereof. Our aim was to facilitate cooperative research by interconnecting
> academic timesharing systems. We didn't hear about the similar ideas being
> proposed by Paul Baran and by Donald Davies in Britain until the end of
> 1967 and by then our architectural specifications were pretty well set. In
> any case, neither Baran nor Davies were able to get funding then, so there
> were no competing development projects.
>
> Following our review of technical proposals for ARPAnet in November 1968,
> BBN was chosen as the contractor and those working on the project came
> mainly from Lincoln Lab. Our committee had foolishly rejected the idea of
> providing email service, which turned out to be the first "killer app," but
> the performance specifications that we chose happily turned out to be able
> to support both email and the much later web services. We were ultimately
> both surprised and delighted by the enormous growth and usefulness of the
> net.
>
> Les Earnest
> Senior Research Scientist Emeritus
> Stanford University
>
> REFERENCES
>
> [1] J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," IRE Transactions on Human
> Factors in Electronics, March 1960.
> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
>
> [2] John McCarthy, "Memorandum to P.J. Morse Proposing Time Sharing", MIT
> Memo, Jan. 1, 1959.
> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing-memo/timesharing-memo.html
>
> [3] Leonard Kleinrock, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets," PhD
> dissertation, MIT, 1963.
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>