Who Really Invented the Internet?

Sound and Vibration, Jan 2007 by Beranek, Leo L

Before Ebay, before Google, before Al Gore, before Tim Berners-Lee - there was a small acoustical consulting firm in Cambridge, MA that put together the team: that designed the system, that fabricated the hardware, that wrote the code, that built the house of Internet.

On October 3, 1969, for the first time, two computers at remote locations 'spoke' to each other over the roadbed of the Internet. Connected by 350 miles of leased telephone line, the two machines, one at the University of California in Los Angeles and the other at Stanford Research Institute, attempted the simplest of messages: the word 'login' transmitted one letter at a time. 'L' and 'O' transmitted perfectly. When the 'G' was transmitted, the SRI computer crashed. Despite the crash, a major hurdle had been cleared and the computers had actually managed to convey a meaningful message, even if not the one planned; in its own phonetic fashion, the UCLA computer said 'ello' to its compatriot in Stanford. The first, albeit tiny, computer, innovative network was now in operation.

With very little danger of negation, one can assume that the Internet is one of the five prodigious inventions of the twentieth century, rubbing shoulders with television, aircraft, atomic energy and space exploration. Unlike several of those, however, it did not have its beginnings in the nineteenth century. As late as 1940, not even an imagination like that of Jules Verne could have foreseen how the collaboration of physical scientists and psychologists in World War II would culminate three decades later in the beginnings of a new communication revolution. Even the blue-ribbon laboratories of A.T.&T., IBM, GE, and the like, when presented with the prospect of a group of computers that could speak simultaneously over a maze of wires, could imagine nothing more than a mechanism that depended on computer-to-computer communication over a single telephone line using central-office switching methods. The vision that went further came from a few other institutions and companies and, most important, the individuals working at them

While one can view the October 1969 transmission as a beginning, for those researchers working in communications and artificial intelligence in the preceding decades, it was an event with long and complicated roots. This article will trace those beginnings from their origin in World War II voice-communication laboratories and seek to demonstrate how the conceptual leaps of a number of gifted individuals, as well as their hard work and production skills, made possible the e-mail you receive each day. As hard as it may be to pin down something as nebulous as invention, the first network is not hard to identify. The computer in Los Angeles said 'ello' to the computer at Stanford via a tiny packet-switched network called ARPANET, named for the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense. Bolt Beranek and Newman, ARPANET'S creator and manager for 20 years, owed its success to several factors - proximity to two renowned universities, a dedication to hiring only the best minds and the free-spending-on-research policies of the US Government following the advent of Sputnik.

In 1948, Professors Richard Bolt, Robert Newman, and I, with the blessing of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formed the acoustical consulting firm, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), then a partnership. Little did we know it at the time, but we were setting the foundation for the development of the Internet, the genesis of which required three conceptual innovations - man-machine systems or symbiosis, time sharing and packet-switching. Over the next fifteen years, BBN would bring together the minds capable of conceiving these three and making them work.

In retrospect, the most resonant of the three for the computer-literate non-specialist appears to be "man-machine symbiosis," a ground breaking concept articulated largely by J. C. R. Licklider. He envisioned access to large computers, then common in major universities, by nearby users who would employ those resources to solve every type of problem. His paper in 1960, while at BBN, was an important rung in the ladder that was to establish his name as the forefather of the Internet. His summary contains:

... Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routine work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking... Prerequisites for the achievement of an effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages and in input and output equipment.

There were, however, twelve years between the founding of BBN and Licklider's insight. Furthermore, the forces that brought BBN and Licklider together reached back to World War II, when the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory (PAL) and the Electro-Acoustic Laboratory (EAL) at Harvard tackled some problems that prevented communication in and from U.S. Air Force aircraft flying at high altitudes. The EAL, under my direction, collaborated closely with PAL, where a young scientist named Licklider demonstrated impressive proficiency in both physics and psychology. We solved the voicecommunication problem by finding and developing microphones, earphones and amplifiers with altitude-friendly components and proving their effectiveness through psycho-acoustic tests. It is apparent now that the daily closely-wedded cooperation between a group of physicists and a group of psychologists that took place at these two separate laboratories was unique in history.