[ih] ruggedized Honeywell 516 ARPANET IMP cabinet top lifting hooks (Was: The IMP Lights story (Was: Nit-picking an origin

[Bernie Cosell]

The story of the ruggedized cabinet was simple:  Larry Roberts knew that the 
IMPs would be installed in the computer rooms of universities and he worried
that the students wouldn't be able to avoid playing around with it, so thought
[correctly] that putting the imp in a ruggedized cabinet would keep them away.

I don't remember what the issue was with the lights, but they were superfluous 
so I programmed up a hack that made the lights act like bouncing balls.  After a
while that was so accepted that the operators used the speed of the balls to judge
how busy the IMP was.

Taking a step back,  to the beginning of the ARPAnet:

In June 1968 there was a meeting at UCLA (which I wasn't invited to :o)) where I 
gather they discussed building a stand alone network: the network nodes would 
be connected to each other and the host systems would connect to the nodes. The 
RFP was issued and to my amazement, BBN won.  And so on January we formed 
two teams -- Severo Ornstein, Ben Barker and Marty Thrope worked on the 
hardware (the imp-imp interface and the imp-host interface) and Will Crowther, 
Dave Walden and I worked on the software.  

We were a great team: Will came up with many innovations, Dave was our 
bedrock, and I was the mad programmer.  Since we had different strengths, we 
actually blended perfectly.  The contract called for the first IMP to be installed at 
UCLA in September [for Len Kleinrock's data collection and monitoring] ... so we 
had just eight months to do the software.  And surprisingly, we pulled it off. The 
September 9th version of the software was sent west.  We were *so* confident 
that the software was solid that we didn't go to participate in the installations: 
Marty and Ben went to install the imps and help the hosts get their interfaces 
working and we stayed behind at BBN.   The first four sites [UCLA, SRI, UTAH 
and Stanford] got their IMPs and the first thing that Marty and Ben observed was 
that the IMP-IMP connections had come alive without a problem.  And when 
they used the console teletype to communicate over the network they knew the 
thing was working [the teletype acted as a "fake host" and so used all the 
machinery of the IMP].  It was so successful and went so smoothly that ARPA 
immediately starting shipping IMPs around the country.   We, BBN, got the next 
IMP and so we could now watch the network from the comfort of our offices.  

Ben cobbled up an IMP interface for the PDP-1 [on which we did all the software 
development via a cross-assembler] and connected it to IMP 5.  At that point we 
could send out updates without have to send rolls of paper tape around the 
country and the IMPs self-monitoring were sent to the PDP-1 and so we had the 
first "network operations center" up and running.  When that happened, we [the 
software team] truly knew our job was done and we all went onto other projects 
and turned the operation of the network over to maintenance programmers.  

  /Bernie\



                 Bernie Cosell
         bernie at fantasyfarm.com
-- Too many people; too few sheep --