Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner

By late 1968, the Cambridge, Mass., consulting company Bolt Beranek & Newman, now known as the BBN Corporation (which ARPA contractors around the country were demanding their own big, expensiveĬomputers a way of connecting them with one another might minimize the need for costly duplication of resources. Licklider's successors at the helm of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office slowly began to bring his networking ideas to fruition. Popular myth that the Internet had been designed to withstand a nuclear attack. The concept would come to be misrepresented by the Baran also suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another. In what came to be known as ''packet-switching,'' special-purpose computers would serve as switches to manage the traffic so that many messages could travel at

It properly with other chunks of the same message. Davies called ''packets.'' Each one would contain not only portions of the message but also information on where it was to be sent and how to reassemble Was the idea of dividing digital messages into chunks that Mr. The key element, independently proposed by Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation and Donald Watts Davies of the British National Physical Laboratory, Ideas about creating such networks were percolating in the computer community. Incompatible devices used mostly for numerical calculations, Licklider envisioned networking them to communicate with one another and with their users. the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.'' Even when computers were huge Licklider, who had written passionately and presciently about a coming era when ''human brains and computing machines will be coupled In 1962, the agency hired a brilliant psychologist and computer scientist named J. Although it was ostensibly dedicated to defense, ARPA's mission of research and development turned out to cut a considerably wider swath. ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late'' traces the roots of the Internet to the Eisenhower Administration's establishment of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, in the wake of Date: September 8, 1996, Late Edition - FinalĪt a time when politicians and free-marketers routinely denounce government intervention and regulation, it is useful to remember that the information highway, like the interstates that preceded it, was initially a product ofįederal largess.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner