says Kahn. “I was the only serious communications person
involved. What we were trying to do was support ARPA’s interest
in getting computers to work together to figure out how we can
build something that would be efficient, effective, and rapid for
computers to communicate, because the telephone network was
poorly adapted to that. It took 10 or 20 seconds to set up a call,
and if all you had to send was 1,000 bits, on a 50-kilobit line that
could go in 20 milliseconds. The existing telephone system was
inefficient for that purpose. So the question was, how could the
telephone network be reinvented in some other fashion. And
that’s what DARPA laid out as a project, to develop a packet-
switched network. It was something I’d been working on, without
knowing DARPA was interested.”
Crocker picks up the story: “During the 1950s and much of the
60s, the notion of a computer was something like a factory. You
wanted to keep it busy because it was a big, heavy, expensive piece
of equipment. The vast majority of computing that took place,
particularly in the larger places where you had a mainframe
serving a campus or business or government agency, was to keep
it busy. That led to batch processing, where you stacked up your
programs, and went away, and later in the afternoon or the next
day, you would get back the answers. Unless you had a bug in
your program, in which case you have to go and fix the bug and
resubmit it. The idea of interactive computing, where you interact
with it and it serves you, as opposed to us serving it and keeping
it busy, had sprouted, but was still contained. In the mid-1960s
there were laboratories that were already well funded, that all
shared this notion of interactive computing.
“ARPA was heavily focused on interactive computing,” Crocker
continues. “Everything from better time-sharing systems on the
one hand to the creation of artificial intelligence technology, to
fancy graphics, to new architectures for computers that led toTHE RUSSIAN
NETWORK
During the Cold War,
the Soviet Union
was building its own
network too. Known
as OGAS (National
Automated System
for Computation
and Information
Processing) it began
in 1962 but was shut
down in 1970 due to a
lack of funding.
Computer
networks had been proposed in the USSR before,
but the military never liked the idea of having to
share information with civilians. Victor Glushkov
(pictured above), a mathematician and director
of the Computational Center of the Academy of
Science of Ukraine, proposed OGAS in 1962, as a
large computing center in Moscow with up to 200
nodes in major cities and 20,000 local terminals
across the country, all connected using existing
telephone infrastructure.
The system would be used, among other
things, for electronic payments, pushing the
Soviet Union toward a cashless economy. While
some saw it as unnecessary centralized control,
it was bureaucratic infighting that ensured
OGAS would fail, as projects run by the Central
Statistical Administration were seen as a threat
to the Ministry of Finance run by the powerful
politician Vasily Garbuzov. Glushkov’s requests
for funding were turned down, and political
interest in the network waned.
The USSR did manage to create a civilian
network, Academsnet, in 1978, but only the
Leningrad section of the network was completed
by the time the Soviet Union fell. It joined the
nascent internet in 1982, using the X.25 protocol
via a link to Austria, and maintained satellite
links with Cuba, Mongolia, and Vietnam.
The Russians weren’t the only ones linking
their computers together. The French created
CYCLADES in the early 1970s, expanding to 20
nodes in 1976 with connections to NPL in London,
and to other European computing hubs.
Even Chile wanted in on the network action,
running Project Cybersyn (cybernetic synergy,
known as Synco) between 1971 and 1973 to
manage the newly socialist central economy. It
consisted of a national network of Telex machines
linked to one mainframe that ran economic
simulations and custom software to check
factory performance. Sadly, the military coup in
1973 caused the project to be abandoned and the
operations room destroyed.
Maps of the ARPANET at the peak of its operations and of the
ARPANET nodes show how the system expanded during the 1970s.getting connected
42 MAXIMU MPC APR 2022
© WIKIMEDIA