[SIGCIS-Members] Unhinged old newspaper reports lead to interesting ARPANET "first message" question

Sat May 14 21:52:05 PDT 2022

Hello SIGCIS,

Longtime members may remember our entanglement
(https://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai) a decade ago with one Shiva Ayyadurai,
self-proclaimed "inventor of email," former quasi-husband of Fran Drescher,
onetime wellness entrepreneur, and more recently a serially failed candidate
for office in Massachusetts and expert consultant on election procedures to
groups trying to overturn the 2020 election. If you don't remember him then
count yourself lucky. Do not on any account visit his Wikipedia page, look
at this article
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-con
vince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/, and then go down a rabbit hole
that will consume the rest of your day. 

Todays message turns out to be about something entirely different even
though it started out with what seemed to be another aspiring inventor of
email. According to some San Antonio newspaper articles from 2009 and 2010
that were recently brought to my attention
https://www.mysanantonio.com/community/northwest/news/article/Innovator-desc
ribes-first-Internet-e-mail-792556.php and
https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Pioneer-recalls-first-e-mail-8
45391.php, Internet email was invented on Oct 1, 1969 by Ben Barker of BBN. 

Here's a taste: "One distinctive artifact remains from the first Internet
e-mail message of 1969: Xolox and Misan decided to use the @ symbol to
locate each other's networks. It's a symbol that's part of every Internet
e-mail today."  This is of course particularly odd because both Internet
email and the @ sign are conventionally attributed to another BBN employee
in 1971: Ray Tomlinson. 

So what's going on here? Well, Ben Barker really was a member of the BBN
ARPANET team. He's mentioned in a similar context a 2020 Harvard Magazine
article by Harry Lewis (an insider account of the emergence of computer
science at Harvard)
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born:

While working for BBN during his Harvard graduate studies, Barker installed
the first IMP at UCLA in September 1969. Thrope, employed full time at BBN
after finishing his undergraduate degree, installed the second IMP a month
later at SRI (originally the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park). On
October 6 Barker sent the first message to Thrope across the network, which
at that point consisted of nothing but those two IMPs. From two nodes the
internet has grown to tens of billions of computers.

Barker does not remember what his message said. The fact that it arrived was
miracle enough.

At this point my head was spinning, given the conventional Oct 29 date for
the first APRANET communication. How could Barker claim to have email
running before packets were being exchanged? But notice that here that
Lewis's claim is that Barker sent a "message across the network" which makes
somewhat more sense, and is an idea could have been garbled by a reporter
into "sent an Internet email." The newspaper articles are very confused -
for example saying that email in 1970 was routinely possible between
computers on the same network, whereas the truth is it was possible only
between users on the same computer. Thus I'm inclined to blame the San
Antonio reporter for all the silliness about @ signs and emails and assume
that what Barker was actually intending to take credit for was sending the
first data between two ARPANET nodes, which seems to be what Lewis is
describing.

That's a much more interesting claim. Were the first ARPANET messages
exchanged on Oct 6, 1969 by Barker and Thorpe? Not according to conventional
history.  I mean, all you have to do it to check Wikipedia. Len Kleinrock
has been boasting for decades that the first ARPANET packet was sent from
UCLA to SRI on 29 October, 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET 

The first successful host to host connection on the ARPANET was made between
Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and UCLA, by SRI programmer Bill Duvall
and UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm PST on 29 October
1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969).[57]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-57>  Kline connected from
UCLA's SDS Sigma 7 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_7>  Host
computer (in Boelter Hall room 3420) to the Stanford Research Institute's
SDS 940 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_940>  Host computer. Kline typed
the command "login," but initially the SDS 940 crashed after he typed two
characters. About an hour later, after Duvall adjusted parameters on the
machine, Kline tried again and successfully logged in. Hence, the first two
characters successfully transmitted over the ARPANET were "lo".[58]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-58> [59]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-59> [60]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#cite_note-60>  The first permanent
ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, between the IMP at UCLA
and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By 5 December 1969, the
initial four-node network was established.

It seems unlikely that Wikipedia, historians, and the IEEE historic
milestone committee
(https://ethw.org/Milestones:Birthplace_of_the_Internet,_1969)  are all
wrong about the Oct 29 date. (Though like many other historians I have some
reservations about the whole "UCLA as birthplace the Internet" narrative:
BBN's role was far more significant than any of the initial user sites. And
if the ARPANET was born when two hosts communicated, how can only one of
them be the first node? Aren't they jointly first?)

Looking closer though, it may well be that what Lewis was attributing to
Barker in the Harvard magazine report something different from the more
commonly celebrated milestone of a "host to host connection." If Barker got
the UCLA and SRI IMPS to send characters back and forth in early Oct, 1969
it could quite plausibly have taken several weeks for Duvall and Kline to
get the timesharing "host" computers in each place to exchange data packets
with each other via the IMPs. I can't find any mention of this two stage
process in the most obvious places, such as Janet Abbate's book _Inventing
the Internet_, but logically speaking the two IMPs must have been talking to
each other before the hosts could talk through them, and the obvious way to
verify this would have been to manually type a message from one IMP to the
other. This would fit with Barker's claim to have "sent a message" to his
BBN colleague who was minding the IMP on the other end. 

BBN/Raytheon seemed to offer a claim like that in this press release, though
with a slightly different date:
https://www.raytheon.com/sites/default/files/rtnwcm/groups/gallery/documents
/digitalasset/rtn_224614.pdf

Barker traveled with the IMP to make sure the airline's cargo crew treated
it with the respect it deserved and Truett Thach, a technician in BBN's Los
Angeles office, met Barker and the IMP as they deplaned. When the IMP got to
UCLA, Barker and Thach attached the cables and powered it up. Instantly, the
machine picked up just where it had left off in Cambridge. Barker phoned
Heart to tell him the good news and that he would be coming home in the
morning. Heart asked Barker to hang around for a few days to see if it
crashed. It didn't. 

On October 1, 1969, the second IMP arrived at SRI and the first characters
were transmitted over the new network. The ARPANET was born. IMPs number
three and four were installed at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah
with little fanfare. IMP installations were beginning to seem routine.

If my reading is correct and if Barker remembered the date and details right
(a big if - some documentation would be nice) then whether he sent the first
APANET message is almost a philosophical question: did the network come into
being when two host computers first communicated over an ARPANET link, or
earlier when two IMPs began to push characters back and forth over a leased
line. Most people would say the former, but it's not unreasonable for Barker
to want to highlight the latter. The answer may also vary depending on
perspective, specifically whether you were an IMP hardware guy, like Barker,
or a network user like Kleinrock.

Every time a question came up that required deep ARPANET knowledge I used to
email Dave Walden, who was one of the original BBN team and had a deep
interest in computer history. He died recently, and I am missing him
greatly. So I am throwing this question to SIGCIS instead: can anyone
confirm that IMP to IMP communication took place between SRI and UCLA
several weeks prior to the better known milestone of host to host
communication? Or otherwise explain what is going on here?

Best wishes,

Tom

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