BBC Interviews Charley Kline and Bill Duvall, Creators of Arpanet (bbc.com) 26
The BBC interviewed scientists Charley Kline and Bill Duvall 55 years after the first communications were made over a system called Arpanet, short for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. "Kline and Duvall were early inventors of networking, networks that would ultimately lead to what is today the Internet," writes longtime Slashdot reader dbialac. "Duvall had basic ideas what might come of the networks, but they had no idea of how much of a phenomenon it would turn into." Here's an excerpt from the interview: BBC: What did you expect Arpanet to become?
Duvall: "I saw the work we were doing at SRI as a critical part of a larger vision, that of information workers connected to each other and sharing problems, observations, documents and solutions. What we did not see was the commercial adoption nor did we anticipate the phenomenon of social media and the associated disinformation plague. Although, it should be noted, that in [SRI computer scientist] Douglas Engelbart's 1962 treatise describing the overall vision, he notes that the capabilities we were creating would trigger profound change in our society, and it would be necessary to simultaneously use and adapt the tools we were creating to address the problems which would arise from their use in society."
What aspects of the internet today remind you of Arpanet?
Duvall: Referring to the larger vision which was being created in Engelbart's group (the mouse, full screen editing, links, etc.), the internet today is a logical evolution of those ideas enhanced, of course, by the contributions of many bright and innovative people and organisations.
Kline: The ability to use resources from others. That's what we do when we use a website. We are using the facilities of the website and its programs, features, etc. And, of course, email. The Arpanet pretty much created the concept of routing and multiple paths from one site to another. That got reliability in case a communication line failed. It also allowed increases in communication speeds by using multiple paths simultaneously. Those concepts have carried over to the internet. Today, the site of the first internet transmission at UCLA's Boetler Hally Room 3420 functions as a monument to technology history (Credit: Courtesy of UCLA) As we developed the communications protocols for the Arpanet, we discovered problems, redesigned and improved the protocols and learned many lessons that carried over to the Internet. TCP/IP [the basic standard for internet connection] was developed both to interconnect networks, in particular the Arpanet with other networks, and also to improve performance, reliability and more.
How do you feel about this anniversary?
Kline: That's a mix. Personally, I feel it is important, but a little overblown. The Arpanet and what sprang from it are very important. This particular anniversary to me is just one of many events. I find somewhat more important than this particular anniversary were the decisions by Arpa to build the Network and continue to support its development.
Duvall: It's nice to remember the origin of something like the internet, but the most important thing is the enormous amount of work that has been done since that time to turn it into what is a major part of societies worldwide.
Duvall: "I saw the work we were doing at SRI as a critical part of a larger vision, that of information workers connected to each other and sharing problems, observations, documents and solutions. What we did not see was the commercial adoption nor did we anticipate the phenomenon of social media and the associated disinformation plague. Although, it should be noted, that in [SRI computer scientist] Douglas Engelbart's 1962 treatise describing the overall vision, he notes that the capabilities we were creating would trigger profound change in our society, and it would be necessary to simultaneously use and adapt the tools we were creating to address the problems which would arise from their use in society."
What aspects of the internet today remind you of Arpanet?
Duvall: Referring to the larger vision which was being created in Engelbart's group (the mouse, full screen editing, links, etc.), the internet today is a logical evolution of those ideas enhanced, of course, by the contributions of many bright and innovative people and organisations.
Kline: The ability to use resources from others. That's what we do when we use a website. We are using the facilities of the website and its programs, features, etc. And, of course, email. The Arpanet pretty much created the concept of routing and multiple paths from one site to another. That got reliability in case a communication line failed. It also allowed increases in communication speeds by using multiple paths simultaneously. Those concepts have carried over to the internet. Today, the site of the first internet transmission at UCLA's Boetler Hally Room 3420 functions as a monument to technology history (Credit: Courtesy of UCLA) As we developed the communications protocols for the Arpanet, we discovered problems, redesigned and improved the protocols and learned many lessons that carried over to the Internet. TCP/IP [the basic standard for internet connection] was developed both to interconnect networks, in particular the Arpanet with other networks, and also to improve performance, reliability and more.
How do you feel about this anniversary?
Kline: That's a mix. Personally, I feel it is important, but a little overblown. The Arpanet and what sprang from it are very important. This particular anniversary to me is just one of many events. I find somewhat more important than this particular anniversary were the decisions by Arpa to build the Network and continue to support its development.
Duvall: It's nice to remember the origin of something like the internet, but the most important thing is the enormous amount of work that has been done since that time to turn it into what is a major part of societies worldwide.
They're like the Wright Brothers (Score:4, Insightful)
of the Digital Age.
Re: (Score:2)
More the like the Mario Brothers. After all, the internet is just a series of tubes.
I like this idea. Who's gonna be Donkey Kong? Bill Gates? The Google founders? Zuckerberg?
Re:They're like the Wright Brothers (Score:4)
That's odd, I thought it was the commercial media that got all bought up by right-wing billionaires that changed and became very slanted, while the BBC, CBC and NPR just stayed as they always had been.
Re:They're like the Wright Brothers (Score:4, Insightful)
"Woke" is what sociopaths yell when they want to discount or shame the idea of sympathy or empathy.
Re: (Score:2)
They're just pissed off that it's no longer cool to beat up the gays behind the gym and that no means no when you're on a date.
Re: (Score:2)
OMG, Reagan is so liberal these days. He associated with the Democratic leader of the house, he even often went to lunch with him. Any true conservative knows that all liberals have radioactive cooties. Remember, all Republican presidents have been RINOs until the coming of the Trump.
So nice to see (Score:3)
The part I most agree with (Score:4, Interesting)
"Kline: While the openness of the internet allows experimentation and new uses, the lack of control can lead to compromises. Arpa kept some control of the Arpanet. That way they could make sure that everything worked, make decisions about which protocols were required, deal with issues such as site names and other issues."
The basic Internet architecture is not fit for purpose, blatantly so for nearly 3 decades by now, yet unfixable ... Cloudflare is now as fundamental a part of the Internet as DNS, it shouldn't be.
Okay, time for my Metamucil (Score:2)
"The BBC interviewed scientists Charley Kline and Bill Duvall 55 years after the first communications were made over a system called Arpanet"
Like a few others here, I predate the internet (as my sig will confirm).
Re: (Score:2)
You are probably mixing up Internet with "world wide web"!
Re: Okay, time for my Metamucil (Score:2)
Perhaps not. Some of us here predate the creation of ARPANet in 1969.
Re: (Score:2)
I do, too.
Re: (Score:2)
I even predate OGAS [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Same here, by years and years.
Re: (Score:2)
That is an interesting link.
Thank you!
Re: (Score:2)
I predate Arpanet by more than a decade.
YOUR PARTY but the world's potluck (Score:1)
Perior to the ARPAnet (and MILnet and the NSFnet and ANS and the Internet of today and so on) the concept was like a party for the neighborhood... except that the food was what YOU brought to YOUR party.
The networking framework of the ARPAnet allowed client/server architecture so that YOUR party could make use of OTHER people's food all over the networks, and now the world. Client/server allowed all the things we take for granted today, like web sites, social media, video sharing, UGC, etc.
The Internet (ca
Multipathing? (Score:3)
> It also allowed increases in communication speeds by using multiple paths simultaneously
Yeah? Did we lose this along the way?
Is anybody multipathing regular v4/6 across the public Internet today?
Re:Multipathing? (Score:4, Informative)
Remember the people who did the work (Score:5, Interesting)
These two men, and their contemporaries and successors, built the ARPAnet (and CSnet, and Usenet) starting from scratch. Yet far more people know the names of predatory capitalists like Schmidt and Brin, Zuckerberg and Musk than they do the real pioneers: Ray Tomlinson, Mike Muuss, Dave Crocker, Jon Postel, Radia Perlman, George Gobel and Mike Marsh (first multi-CPU Unix system), Dave Stevens, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Eric Allman, Keith Bostic, Bill Joy, and others that I could list. These are the people who stayed up late and did the work that we're still building on because it was astonishingly good, and collectively they did far more not just for the Internet, but for the world, than any of the greedy egotistical scumbags at today's companies have done -- or will ever do.
Re: (Score:3)
I was about a decade behind these guys, and I was fortunate enough to meet and work with a cross-section of network and Unix people. The thing about them that remains with me after all this time is that nobody was trying to get rich; nobody was trying to be famous; everyone was just trying to build something that was useful for the entire world. And they were willing to do whatever it took to make it happen, whether that was dragging cables or writing code or soldering components or building systems. These two men, and their contemporaries and successors, built the ARPAnet (and CSnet, and Usenet) starting from scratch. Yet far more people know the names of predatory capitalists like Schmidt and Brin, Zuckerberg and Musk than they do the real pioneers: Ray Tomlinson, Mike Muuss, Dave Crocker, Jon Postel, Radia Perlman, George Gobel and Mike Marsh (first multi-CPU Unix system), Dave Stevens, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Eric Allman, Keith Bostic, Bill Joy, and others that I could list. These are the people who stayed up late and did the work that we're still building on because it was astonishingly good, and collectively they did far more not just for the Internet, but for the world, than any of the greedy egotistical scumbags at today's companies have done -- or will ever do.
Heroes are passe, brah. Everybody loves a good villain. That's why we know the names we know. We want someone to rail against.