If you run an image search for the word “ARPANET,” you will find lots of maps showing how the government research network expanded steadily across the country throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s. I’m guessing that most people reading or hearing about the ARPANET for the first time encounter one of these maps.
Obviously, the maps are interesting—it’s hard to believe that there were once so few networked computers that their locations could all be conveyed with what is really pretty lo-fi cartography. (We’re talking 1960s overhead projector diagrams here. You know the vibe.) But the problem with the maps, drawn as they are with bold lines stretching across the continent, is that they reinforce the idea that the ARPANET’s paramount achievement was connecting computers across the vast distances of the United States for the first time.
Today, the internet is a lifeline that keeps us tethered to each other even as an airborne virus has us all locked up indoors. So it’s easy to imagine that, if the ARPANET was the first draft of the internet, then surely the world that existed before it was entirely disconnected, since that’s where we’d be without the internet today, right? The ARPANET must have been a big deal because it connected people via computers when that hadn’t before been possible.
That view doesn’t get the history quite right. It also undersells what made the ARPANET such a breakthrough.
The Debut
The Washington Hilton stands near the top of a small rise about a mile and a half northeast of the National Mall. Its two white-painted modern facades sweep out in broad semicircles like the wings of a bird. The New York Times, reporting on the hotel’s completion in 1965, remarked that the building looks “like a sea gull perched on a hilltop nest.”
The hotel hides its most famous feature below ground. Underneath the driveway roundabout is an enormous ovoid event space known as the International Ballroom, which was for many years the largest pillar-less ballroom in DC. In 1967, the Doors played a concert there. In 1968, Jimi Hendrix also played a concert there. In 1972, a somewhat more sedate act took over the ballroom to put on the inaugural International Conference on Computing Communication, where a promising research project known as the ARPANET was demonstrated publicly for the first time.
The 1972 ICCC, which took place from October 24th to 26th, was attended by about 800 people. It brought together all of the leading researchers in the nascent field of computer networking. According to internet pioneer Bob Kahn, “if somebody had dropped a bomb on the Washington Hilton, it would have destroyed almost all of the networking community in the US at that point.”
Not all of the attendees were computer scientists, however. An advertisement for the conference claimed it would be “user-focused” and geared toward “lawyers, medical men, economists, and government men as well as engineers and communicators.” Some of the conference’s sessions were highly technical, such as the session titled “Data Network Design Problems I” and its sequel session, “Data Network Design Problems II.” But most of the sessions were, as promised, focused on the potential social and economic impacts of computer networking. One session, eerily prescient today, sought to foster a discussion about how the legal system could act proactively “to safeguard the right of privacy in the computer data bank.”
The ARPANET demonstration was intended as a side attraction of sorts for the attendees. Between sessions, which were held either in the International Ballroom or elsewhere on the lower level of the hotel, attendees were free to wander into the Georgetown Ballroom (a smaller ballroom/conference room down the hall from the big one), where there were 40 terminals from a variety of manufacturers set up to access the ARPANET. These terminals were dumb terminals—they only handled input and output and could do no computation on their own. (In fact, in 1972, it’s likely that all of these terminals were hardcopy terminals, i.e. teletype machines.) The terminals were all hooked up to a computer known as a Terminal Interface Message Processor or TIP, which sat on a raised platform in the middle of the room. The TIP was a kind of archaic router specially designed to connect dumb terminals to the ARPANET. Using the terminals and the TIP, the ICCC attendees could experiment with logging on and accessing some of the computers at the 29 host sites then comprising the ARPANET.
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