[ih] Ars Technica: A History of of the Internet Pt. 1

[Jack Haverty]

On 4/16/25 02:23, Tracy F. Hackshaw @ Google via Internet-history wrote:
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/a-history-of-the-internet-part-1-an-arpa-dream-takes-form/
>
> Scroll down to the end for Vint's review of the article.

My recollections are similar to Vint's - there are a few minor errors 
but mostly it seems to be pretty accurate.

There were some more details of Lick's role that I think were important.

Lick was my advisor and then boss at MIT in the 1970s.  His 
"Intergalactic Network" idea was whimsically named, but he really 
believed in it and that drove much of our research in his group at MIT.

His whimsical idea was basically that there would someday be a vast 
collection of computers, all communicating with each other using some 
kind of network technology, and all of them would be assisting humans in 
doing everything that humans do.  Everyone, not just the technoscenti,  
would have their personal machine, which would act as their smart agent 
to interact with other machines to do what people do.

At the time, your "personal machine" was a large shared computer that 
you could interact with by using some kind of terminal.  We struggled to 
implement Lick's vision with the constraints of technology available at 
the time.  Today, after many decades of the effects of Moore's Law, 
Lick's vision sounds to me a lot like the Internet world we now all 
experience.

Lick spent time at BBN, MIT, and ARPA.  During the 70s, he even 
disappeared from MIT for a year, going back to ARPA to "fix some 
problems".  His vision stayed with me for many years.  BTW, Waldrop's 
book "The Dream Machine" contains much more of that early history and 
closely matches my own recollections.

A few minor errors:

I worked with Ray Tomlinson at BBN, but never met Roy Tomlinson. Perhaps 
that was Ray's brother (<

Also, the "map of the Internet in 1977" is actually a map of the ARPANET 
at the time.   The small circles were all ARPANET IMPs, and the jagged 
lines were satellite circuits interconnecting IMPs.  No gateways or 
other networks are shown, although there were a few occasionally 
connected to IMPs at the time.  It was challenging to create a map of 
the Internet even then.  Jon's later map from 1982 seems accurate.

Jack Haverty

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