From one of the Internet's tiny treasures, Delancey Place:
Today's selection -- from Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik.
In
1966, Robert "Bob" Taylor, an employee at the U.S. government's
Advanced Research Projects Agency, had an insight that led to the
creation of the internet:
"[Bob Taylor's] most enduring legacy, however, was ... a leap of
intuition that tied together everything else he had done. This was the
ARPANET, the precursor of today's Internet.
"Taylor's original model of a nationwide computer network grew out of
his observation that time-sharing was starting to promote the formation
of a sort of nationwide computing brotherhood (at this time very few
members were women). Whether they were at MIT, Stanford, or
UCLA, researchers were all looking for answers to the same general
questions. 'These people began to know one another, share a lot of
information, and ask of one another, "How do I use this? Where do I find
that?"' Taylor recalled. 'It was really phenomenal to see this computer
become a medium that stimulated the formation of a human community.'
"There was still a long way to go before reaching that ideal,
however. The community was less like a nation than a swarm of tribal
hamlets, often mutually unintelligible or even mutually hostile. Design
differences among their machines kept many groups digitally isolated
from the others. The risk was that each institution would develop its
own unique and insular culture, like related species of birds evolving
independently on islands in a vast uncharted sea. Pondering how to bind
them into a larger whole, Taylor sought a way for all groups to
interact via their computers, each island community enjoying constant
access to the others' machines as though they all lived on one
contiguous virtual continent.
"This concept would develop into the ARPANET. The idea owed something
to Licklider, who had earlier proposed what he dryly called an
'intergalactic network' of mainframes. During his time at ARPA the
notion remained theoretical, however; it was hard enough to get
small-scale time-sharing systems to run individually, much less in
concert with one another. But Taylor judged that the technology had now
progressed far enough to make the concept practical. He did not deceive
himself: Building such a system meant overcoming prodigious obstacles.
On the other hand, ARPAs generous umbrella sheltered hundreds of
scientists and engineers whose prodigious talents, he reasoned, were
fully up to the challenge.
"One day in February 1966 Taylor knocked at the office of
ARPAs director, the Austrian-born physicist Charles Herzfeld, armed with
little more than this vague notion of a digital web connecting bands
of time-sharers around the country. At any other agency he would have
been expected to produce reams of documentation rationalizing the
program and projecting its costs out to the next millennium; not ARPA....
....
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