by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
[This excerpt of Wizards, a history of email titled "Talking Headers," appeared in The Washington Post Magazine on August 4, 1996. It was edited by Bob Thompson and John Cotter.]
One September evening in 1973, Len Kleinrock, a computer scientist at UCLA, was unpacking his bags when he discovered that he'd forgotten his razor. He'd just returned home to Los Angeles from Brighton, England, where he'd left the razor in a Sussex University dormitory bathroom. An ordinary electric razor, it was no big loss. "But it was mine," he recalled, "and I wanted it back."
Kleinrock had just come from a conference on computing and communications. The conference had brought together scientists from several countries, some of whom had begun developing digital networks under the auspices of their own governments. But the U.S. government's ARPANET -- a growing multimillion-dollar network launched in 1969 by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with the aim of electronically linking dozens of major computer science labs throughout the country -- was by far the largest and most sophisticated network experiment in the world, and the international community welcomed the chance to see the project demonstrated. The organizers of the conference had also decided to use the occasion to test the transmission of data packets via satellite. For the conference, a temporary link from the United States had been patched into Brighton. Packets traveled over a satellite link from Virginia to an earth station in Cornwall, at Goonhilly Downs near Land's End, and from there a dedicated phone line was installed to connect with the University of London. From London there was a final link to Brighton, where people had a chance to use the ARPANET just as if they were sitting in an office in Cambridge, Mass., or Menlo Park, Calif.
Kleinrock had returned to the States a day early, so when he realized he had forgotten his razor, he thought he might find someone still at the conference to retrieve it. There was a handy bit of software on the network called the resource-sharing executive, or RSEXEC. If you typed in "where so-and-so," RSEXEC looked for so-and-so by searching the "who" list -- a roster of everyone logged on -- at each site. You could locate a person on the network this way if he happened to be logged on at that moment. "I asked myself, What maniac would be logged in at 3 a.m.?" Kleinrock remembered. He went to his terminal and typed "where roberts."
A few minutes later, Kleinrock's terminal displayed the answer. Larry Roberts, the head of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office, was indeed still in Brighton, awake, and at the moment connected via the satellite to a host computer at Bolt Beranek & Newman ( BBN), the small Cambridge consulting firm that had won the ARPA contract to build and run the network. A Teletype number for Roberts also appeared on Kleinrock's screen, enough information for him to tap his colleague on the shoulder electronically from L.A.
"All I had to do was make a Teletype connection to BBN," said Kleinrock. He linked to Roberts using TALK, a program that allowed them to converse by typing onto one half of a split screen while reading from the other. The two friends traded greetings. "I asked if he could retrieve the razor. He said, `Sure, no problem.' " The next day the razor was returned by Danny Cohen, a mutual friend who had been at the conference and had come back to L.A.
There weren't any formal rules restricting use of the ARPANET by those with authorized access. Kleinrock's razor retrieval caper wasn't the first time anyone had pushed past official parameters in using the network. People were sending more and more personal messages. Rumor had it that even a dope deal or two had been made over some of the packet-switching network links in Northern California. Still, tapping into the ARPANET to fetch a shaver across international lines was a bit like being a stowaway on an aircraft carrier. The ARPANET was an official federal research facility, after all, and not something to be toyed with. Kleinrock had the feeling that the stunt he'd pulled was slightly out of bounds. "It was a thrill. I felt I was stretching the Net."
A quarter-century before Internet e-mail would become a fixture on Capitol Hill, years before the personal computer revolution, a cadre of techies working around the clock invented the most important two-way communications medium since the telephone. The ARPANET was the computer network that revolutionized communications and gave rise to the global Internet. The product of a golden era in American science and technology, the ARPANET reaped the benefit of a number of resources: the genius of the nation's research universities, the faith of Washington's R&D budget managers, and possibly the fastest million dollars ever obtained by an ARPA division director -- a young Texan named Bob Taylor who walked into his boss's third-floor Pentagon office one day in 1966 with a new idea and 20 minutes later emerged with approval to build the experimental network.
Contrary to popular myth, rampant today, the ARPANET was never intended to serve as a means of communication built to survive nuclear war. The whole idea was simply to link the large (and expensive) computers that ARPA purchased for individual researchers in distant laboratories throughout the country so they could economize and share resources.
That his boss would bet a million dollars on Taylor's idea, based on a brief conversation, was the epitome of the old freewheeling " ARPA style" that featured fast responses, big risks and blue-sky research. The agency, created by the Eisenhower administration in response to the Soviet Union's stunning launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, was staffed by top-flight scientists and engineers, and was built to take risks that other R&D centers would not. By the early 1960s, ARPA had become the main sponsor of the nation's most advanced computer science research, which was flourishing at MIT, UCLA and a few other places.
The rudimentary ideas for a network in which machines traded data with other machines had been pondered by several computing pioneers: J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, Paul Baran of the Rand Corp., Donald Davies of Britain's National Physical Laboratory. Each had thought about the concept independently, unknown to one another. But it was Taylor, a whip-smart research manager, who grasped the government's role in high-risk, high-potential R&D and who put in motion the network project that industry giants like AT&T and IBM had proclaimed would never work.
By 1969, in Cambridge and Los Angeles, the inventions of a tight community of a few dozen computer scientists and engineers -- young, brilliant, opinionated, driven -- were being wired up to form the ARPANET. The first traffic on the network, though relatively sparse, was moving smoothly by the end of 1970. And, as ARPA continued pouring on the funding, in the 1970s network growth exploded with the advent of e-mail.
The ARPANET was not intended as a message system. In the minds of its inventors, the network was intended for resource-sharing, period. That very little of its capacity was actually ever used for resource-sharing was a fact soon submersed in the tide of electronic mail.
Between 1972 and the early 1980s, e-mail, or network mail as it was referred to, was discovered by thousands of early users. Those years gave rise to many of the enduring features of modern digital culture: flames, emoticons, the @ sign, debates on free speech and privacy, and a sleepless search for technical improvements and agreements about the technical underpinnings of it all. At first, e-mail was difficult to use, but by the end of the 1970s the big problems had been licked. The big rise in message traffic was to become the largest early force in the network's growth and development. E-mail was to the ARPANET what the Louisiana Purchase was to the young United States. Things only got better as the network grew and technology converged with the torrential human tendency to talk.
Electronic mail would become the long-playing record of cyberspace. Just as the LP was invented for connoisseurs and audiophiles but spawned an entire industry, electronic mail grew first among the elite community of computer scientists on the ARPANET, then later bloomed like plankton across the Internet. It was about the time Kleinrock was reaching for his razor that taboos were tumbling and the tone of message traffic on the Net started loosening up.
As cultural artifact, electronic mail belongs in a category somewhere between found art and lucky accidents. The ARPANET's creators didn't have a grand vision for the invention of an earth-circling message-handling system. But once the first couple of dozen sites, or "nodes," on the network were operational, early users turned the system of linked computers into a tool of personal as well as professional communications. Using the ARPANET as a sophisticated mail system was simply a good hack. In those days hacking had nothing to do with malicious or destructive behavior; a good hack was a creative or inspired bit of programming. The best hackers were professionals. Meddlesome and malicious network users, of which there were virtually none at the outset, were first referred to as "network randoms" or "net randoms" or just plain "randoms." It would be the '80s before hacking was given a bad name.
BREAK In the decade before the ARPANET, computer scientists had devised ways of exchanging electronic messages within a time-sharing system. Researchers on the same time-sharing system each had a designated file, like an in-box, in the central machine. Colleagues could address short electronic messages to someone else's box, where only the recipient could read them. Messages could be dropped and picked up at any time. It was convenient, given the odd hours people kept. People within a single lab sent parades of one-liners back and forth, as well as longer memoranda and drafts of papers.
The first of these programs, called MAILBOX, was installed in the early 1960s on the Compatible Time-Sharing System at MIT. Similar mailboxes became a standard feature of almost every time-sharing system built thereafter. In places where people were spread out, programmers working hundreds of yards apart could exchange messages without having to get up from their desks. But often, exchanging messages in a single machine, or domain, became a superfluous exercise -- like two people using walkie-talkies to converse in a one-room cabin. Said one user, "I'll never forget a colleague who, while working in the next office, would constantly send me e-mail and it never failed to surprise him when I got up and walked next door to respond to him."
By virtue of its geographic reach, the ARPA network turned electronic mail from an interesting toy into a useful tool. The tendencies of the ARPANET community ran strongly democratic, with something of an anarchic streak. The ARPANET's earliest users were constantly generating a steady stream of new ideas, tinkering with old ones, pushing, pulling or prodding their network to do this or that, spawning an atmosphere of creative chaos. The art of computer programming gave them room for endless riffs, and variations on any theme. One of the main themes became electronic mail.
The first electronic-mail delivery engaging two machines was done one day in 1972 by a quiet engineer, Ray Tomlinson at BBN. Sometime earlier, Tomlinson had written a mail program for Tenex, the BBN-grown operating system that, by now, was running on most of the ARPANET's PDP-10 machines. The mail program was written in two parts: To send messages, you'd use a program called SNDMSG; to receive mail, you'd use the other part called READMAIL. He hadn't actually intended for the program to be used on the ARPANET. Like other mailbox programs of the day it was created for time-sharing systems and designed only to handle mail locally, within individual PDP-10s, not across them.
But Tomlinson, an inveterate experimenter, decided to take advantage of having two PDP-10 computers set up in the Cambridge office; in fact, they were the same machines BBN was using to connect to the ARPANET. Weeks earlier, Tomlinson had written an experimental file-transfer protocol called CPYNET. Now he modified the program so that it could carry a mail message from one machine and drop it into a file on another. When he tried it, and sent mail from one PDP-10 to the other, the little hack worked, and even though his mail hadn't actually gone out onto the open network, it had crossed an important historical divide. Tomlinson's CPYNET hack was a breakthrough; now there was nothing holding e-mail back from crossing the wider Net. Although in technical terms Tomlinson's program was trivial, culturally it was revolutionary. " SNDMSG opened the door," said Dave Crocker, an e-mail pioneer who was a member of the technical support staff in UCLA's computer science department. "It created the first interconnectivity, then everyone took it from there."
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