Unhinged old newspaper reports lead to interesting ARPANET "first message" question
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
Hi, Tom. I think that the IMP story in early October makes a lot of sense. If I recall correctly, there's a fair bit of detail on that in Where Wizards Say Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. A 1994 article from CIO Magazine[1] reporting on an ARPAnet 25th anniversary celebration has approximately the timeline you described (early October IMPs talking, late October the host computers beginning to communicate.) Leo Beranek's "Roots of the Internet: A Personal History"[2] seems to conflate the two events, putting them both on October 3, 1969. The Computer History Museum specifically says: "fter installation in September, handwritten logs from UCLA show the first host-to-host connection, from UCLA to SRI, is made on October 29, 1969. The first 'Log-In' crashes the SRI host, but the next attempt works!"[3], referring to it as the "first host-to-host connection", which would be the computers involved. From an engineering point of view, this story makes a lot of sense. Obviously the IMPs have to communicate with each other before the hosts can, and in that kind of project you would test components step by step to build up the whole system. Some of the references discuss getting the host-IMP connection working in early October 1969 as well, also an important milestone. In a way, that's a pretty significant one, because BBN had the IMPs talking to each other in the lab before shipping them, so the main difference was interposing the real long-distance connection. Philosophically, I think that "the ARPAnet coming into existence" would be people communicating using host computers, since that was the goal of the network. Barker's work is still a milestone in getting there. It's easy to see how it can get overlooked in the big story, and also how the various events get confused, especially with the common use of the term "message". Different levels of the networking stack use "message" somewhat differently, combined with colloquial use in general. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=hQ0AAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=%5Bih%5D+barker+first+arpanet+message&source=bl&ots=1e0KyN7__B&sig=ACfU3U3QDj4zdgJBCSrClitp21fjy6PUwQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwigt9nGuOL3AhXBkokEHRArBtEQ6AF6BAglEAM#v=onepage&q=%5Bih%5D%20barker%20first%20arpanet%20message&f=false [2] https://www-jstor-org.alumproxy.mit.edu/stable/25081152?seq=1 [3] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/ Best, Win
On May 15, 2022, at 12:52 AM, thomas.haigh@gmail.com wrote:
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..., 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... and https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Pioneer-recalls-first-e-mail-8..., 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] Kline connected from UCLA's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer (in Boelter Hall room 3420) to the Stanford Research Institute's 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][59][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...
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
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
On 20-May-22 12:47, Win Treese wrote:
Hi, Tom. I think that the IMP story in early October makes a lot of sense. If I recall correctly, there's a fair bit of detail on that in Where Wizards Say Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.
Yes, but they do not settle the date question. The famous failed LOG attempt and, after a software fix, the successful LOGIN attempt are described (pages 152-154 in my copy) without specifying the exact date in October. To be clear, that was a host-to-host connection (essentially a primitive telnet) between the UCLA Sigma-7 and the SRI SDS 940. They do state that the SRI IMP was delivered on October 1. But there is no reference to IMP-to-IMP tests. My assumption is that IMP-to-IMP tests would have been BBN's responsibility, and would have been first done in the BBN lab before shipping any IMPs to California.
A 1994 article from CIO Magazine[1] reporting on an ARPAnet 25th anniversary celebration has approximately the timeline you described (early October IMPs talking, late October the host computers beginning to communicate.)
Hmm. The famous first LOG/LOGIN connection had Charley Kline, an undergraduate, at the UCLA end, according to Hafner & Lyon. That article refers to Ben Barker and Marty Thrope, and again the date is vague. There is mention of the UCLA IMP commissioning on September 2 and the UCLA-SRI connection "a month later", which is compatible with pretty much any date in October. But they didn't do any host-to-host work; that was done by the academics at both sites, not by BBN people.
Leo Beranek's "Roots of the Internet: A Personal History"[2] seems to conflate the two events, putting them both on October 3, 1969.
He precisely dates the events as described by Hafner & Lyon, even using some of the same wording. But see my next comment.
The Computer History Museum specifically says: "fter installation in September, handwritten logs from UCLA show the first host-to-host connection, from UCLA to SRI, is made on October 29, 1969. The first 'Log-In' crashes the SRI host, but the next attempt works!"[3], referring to it as the
"first host-to-host connection", which would be the computers involved. Yes, they seem sure of that date, and they identify Bill Duvall as the SRI end [4]. Watch the protagonists at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7duyl0ZZ5BQ . They also seem sure it was the 29th. It seems that Duvall spent a few weeks after the IMP arrived at SRI making its connection with the SDS 940 work.
From an engineering point of view, this story makes a lot of sense. Obviously the IMPs have to communicate with each other before the hosts can, and in that kind of project you would test components step by step to build up the whole system. Some of the references discuss getting the host-IMP connection working in early October 1969 as well, also an important milestone. In a way, that's a pretty significant one, because BBN had the IMPs talking to each other in the lab before shipping them, so the main difference was interposing the real long-distance connection.
Philosophically, I think that "the ARPAnet coming into existence" would be people communicating using host computers, since that was the goal of the network. Barker's work is still a milestone in getting there. It's easy to see how it can get overlooked in the big story, and also how the various events get confused, especially with the common use of the term "message". Different levels of the networking stack use "message" somewhat differently, combined with colloquial use in general.
[2] https://www-jstor-org.alumproxy.mit.edu/stable/25081152?seq=1
[3] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/
Best,
Win
On May 15, 2022, at 12:52 AM, thomas.haigh@gmail.com wrote:
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..., 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
Here’s a taste: “One distinctive artifact remains from
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] Kline connected from UCLA's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer (in Boelter Hall room 3420) to the Stanford Research Institute's 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][59][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...
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
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
In fact it seems clear that the UCLA (Sigma-7) to IMP connection worked at some time in September, and that SRI was ready and waiting when their IMP arrived. But from what Duvall says in the above video, he presumably spent most of October writing the necessary code. If anything happened on October 3 or 6, I think we can assume it was the repetition over a modem link of BBN lab tests between two IMPS. Useful, necessary, but not earth-shattering work; what any engineer would do in the circumstances. Regards Brian Carpenter [4] https://computerhistory.org/blog/october-29-1969-happy-40th-birthday-to-a-ra... 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... and https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Pioneer-recalls-first-e-mail-8..., Internet email was invented on Oct 1, 1969 by Ben Barker of BBN. 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. list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
On 20-May-22 12:47, Win Treese wrote:
Hi, Tom. I think that the IMP story in early October makes a lot of sense. If I recall correctly, there's a fair bit of detail on that in Where Wizards Say Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.
Yes, but they do not settle the date question. The famous failed LOG attempt and, after a software fix, the successful LOGIN attempt are described (pages 152-154 in my copy) without specifying the exact date in October. To be clear, that was a host-to-host connection (essentially a primitive telnet) between the UCLA Sigma-7 and the SRI SDS 940.
They do state that the SRI IMP was delivered on October 1. But there is no reference to IMP-to-IMP tests. My assumption is that IMP-to-IMP tests would have been BBN's responsibility, and would have been first done in the BBN lab before shipping any IMPs to California.
A 1994 article from CIO Magazine[1] reporting on an ARPAnet 25th anniversary celebration has approximately the timeline you described (early October IMPs talking, late October the host computers beginning to communicate.)
Hmm. The famous first LOG/LOGIN connection had Charley Kline, an undergraduate, at the UCLA end, according to Hafner & Lyon. That article refers to Ben Barker and Marty Thrope, and again the date is vague. There is mention of the UCLA IMP commissioning on September 2 and the UCLA-SRI connection "a month later", which is compatible with pretty much any date in October. But they didn't do any host-to-host work; that was done by the academics at both sites, not by BBN people.
Leo Beranek's "Roots of the Internet: A Personal History"[2] seems to conflate the two events, putting them both on October 3, 1969.
He precisely dates the events as described by Hafner & Lyon, even using some of the same wording. But see my next comment.
The Computer History Museum specifically says: "fter installation in September, handwritten logs from UCLA show the first host-to-host connection, from UCLA to SRI, is made on October 29, 1969. The first 'Log-In' crashes the SRI host, but the next attempt works!"[3], referring to it as the
"first host-to-host connection", which would be the computers involved.
Yes, they seem sure of that date, and they identify Bill Duvall as the SRI end [4].
Watch the protagonists at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7duyl0ZZ5BQ . They also seem sure it was the 29th. It seems that Duvall spent a few weeks after the IMP arrived at SRI making its connection with the SDS 940 work.
From an engineering point of view, this story makes a lot of sense. Obviously the IMPs have to communicate with each other before the hosts can, and in that kind of project you would test components step by step to build up the whole system. Some of the references discuss getting the host-IMP connection working in early October 1969 as well, also an important milestone. In a way, that's a pretty significant one, because BBN had the IMPs talking to each other in the lab before shipping them, so the main difference was interposing the real long-distance connection.
In fact it seems clear that the UCLA (Sigma-7) to IMP connection worked at some time in September, and that SRI was ready and waiting when their IMP arrived. But from what Duvall says in the above video, he presumably spent most of October writing the necessary code.
If anything happened on October 3 or 6, I think we can assume it was the repetition over a modem link of BBN lab tests between two IMPS. Useful, necessary, but not earth-shattering work; what any engineer would do in the circumstances.
Regards Brian Carpenter
[4] https://computerhistory.org/blog/october-29-1969-happy-40th-birthday-to-a-ra...
Philosophically, I think that "the ARPAnet coming into existence" would be people communicating using host computers, since that was the goal of the network. Barker's work is still a milestone in getting there. It's easy to see how it can get overlooked in the big story, and also how the various events get confused, especially with the common use of the term "message". Different levels of the networking stack use "message" somewhat differently, combined with colloquial use in general.
[2] https://www-jstor-org.alumproxy.mit.edu/stable/25081152?seq=1
[3] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/
Best,
Win
On May 15, 2022, at 12:52 AM, thomas.haigh@gmail.com wrote:
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..., 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... and https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Pioneer-recalls-first-e-mail-8..., 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] Kline connected from UCLA's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer (in Boelter Hall room 3420) to the Stanford Research Institute's 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][59][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,
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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Another date in the running: October 6. BBN Report 1925 (from https://www.telecomarchive.com/bbn.html) says: "This report covers the period 1 October 1969 - 31 December 1969. Within this period, we have: 1. Delivered production IMP #2 to SRI on 6 October. The IMP came up in one day and within two weeks, the Host/ IMP communication was operating." Also, as I thought, BBN had already done lab tests. Report 1890 says: "This Quarterly Technical Report No. 3 describes several aspects of our progress on the ARPA computer network during the third quarter of 1969. During this period, the first IMP was delivered to UCLA on schedule with an operational program. The IMP successfully communicated with the UCLA Host computer (a Sigma 7). ... 2. HARDWARE CHECKOUT AND INSTALLATION During this quarter, we tested the IMPs intensively. After being tested separately, the IMPs were combined into small net- works of two or three locally connected IMPs and then retested. Upon installation at UCLA, the IMP was tested further." So the first IMP-to-IMP packets were exchanged on BBN premises during 3Q1969. Regards Brian Carpenter On 20-May-22 15:38, Brian E Carpenter wrote: though with a slightly different date: https://www.raytheon.com/sites/default/files/rtnwcm/groups/gallery/documents... list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
participants (3)
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Brian E Carpenter -
thomas.haigh＠gmail.com -
Win Treese