[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Steve, Andrew,

There's more to the history.

I was in Lick's world from 1970 through 1977 at MIT.   I recall that 
sometime in the early 1970s, Lick left MIT to go to (D)ARPA.  But that 
wasn't his first time at ARPA.   At MIT, he told us that he had been at 
ARPA before, and that he "had to go back to fix some things."  He also 
promised to return to MIT, and he did a year or so later.

There is a formidable book "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop, that 
is essentially a biography of Lick.   It's theme on the cover is "J.C.R. 
Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal"

That book contains a lot of detail about the non-technical aspects of 
history, including the ARPANET, and the interactions among all the 
people involved.   It's valuable reading for historians; you won't find 
any explanations of technology, protocols, or such details but it 
explains a lot about why and how such technologies came into existence.

It wasn't published until 2001.  Reading it about a decade ago, I 
learned a lot about the history I experienced with Lick that I didn't 
know before.   For example:

- Lick worked at BBN, working on projects involving psycho-acoustics; 
his training was in Psychology, but he convinced BBN management in the 
early 1960s to buy a computer for processing acoustical data and he 
became a self-taught programmer.  From my own time much later at BBN, I 
know how hard that must have been.
- Lick left BBN on a 1-year leave of absence to join ARPA in October 
1962 when it was still housed in the Pentagon; he was given a budget to 
create and run projects to get DoD into computer research, which the 
Administration thought would be important; the ARPA activities Lick 
created and funded became IPTO - the "Information Processing Techniques 
Office" of ARPA; IPTO funded lots of research projects all over the US
- Lick's vision was of pervasive computers somehow all communicating 
with each other to assist humans; he funded MIT to create Project Mac; 
MAC stood for either "Man and Computer" or "Machine Aided Cognition"
- There was a community of researchers who were all friends, talking to 
each other, funding each other, and moving around within the academic, 
government, and commercial worlds.   Collectively they started computing 
on the path to where we are today.  Names like Engelbart, Taylor, 
Minsky, Feigenbaum, etc.
- Lick wrote a memo in 1960 outlining his vision of "Symbiosis", in 
which computers and humans would form a team to tackle problems. The 
idea was to evolve from the current view that computers were good for 
crunching numbers and interacting with them using punchcards and 
printouts was fine.  The vision desired real-time interaction and 
graphical displays -- i.e., "timesharing". Individuals would have 
computers always available to them, helping them do everything that 
humans do.  At the time that meant an account on a large, expensive 
time-shared computer, that you could "dial in to" when you needed to 
interact; today of course it's the device in your pocket.
- At ARPA, Lick dictated a memo to PIs (Principal Investigators on 
ARPA-funded projects) outlining his vision of an "Intergalactic Network" 
which would link computers together.  As a first step, he told the PIs 
that their computers (funded by ARPA) would soon need to be 
interconnected.  A few years later, that became the ARPANET project, and 
BBN (where Lick had worked) got the contract.

In my time in Lick's world, Lick was always looking forward and didn't 
talk much about his previous experiences.  The Waldrop book really does 
put a lot of the pieces together.    I learned a lot of explanations of 
*why* things that I experienced actually happened, and "how" it happened 
by what people did.

In retrospect, I've realized that I personally latched onto Lick's 
vision of "computers helping humans do everything humans do" and did 
what I could to implement it.

Lick's background in Psychology and his vision of man-computer(s) 
symbiosis seems to reflect the view of the "man on the street" today 
about "The Internet".  Internet techies have carved up the symbiosis 
into two world - the infrastructure which carried IP datagrams, and the 
"apps" which humans use to do everything humans do.  Non-techies just 
think of The Internet as all of the things they can do using the device 
in their pocket or on their desk.   Humans don't send IP datagrams, but 
they do communicate with other humans, read things other humans have 
written, buy and sell products to each other, get entertainment, express 
their opinions to whoever is listening, and everything else humans do.  
  (How AIs fit in this world is yet to be seen....)

 From my experiences in the military networks, and similar encounters in 
commercial world, I think I now understand how The Internet took over so 
aggressively.  Governments and Corporations have the same needs for C3I 
(Communications, Command, Control, Intelligence). They both gather 
information about what is going on in the world.  They both convey such 
information to decision makers who decide what to do about it.  They 
both issue commands to make those decisions happen.  They both need a 
communications infrastructure to get everyone talking to each other.  
They both have complex worlds and need computers to help manage the 
complexity as fast as possible.

The military world makes decisions such as dropping bombs somewhere, 
launching missiles at something, or moving troops and equipment around.  
Corporations make decisions such as launching new products, opening new 
sales offices, or building new plants.   They both need a good C3I 
infrastructure to do it.

Lick's vision applies well either to military or commercial activities - 
anything that needs "man-computer symbiosis" to help humans do 
everything humans do, as fast as they need to do it.

/Jack Haverty



On 4/29/26 07:22, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> Andrew, et al,
>
> Let me offer a slightly different perspective regarding the "customer" and
> the social environment surrounding the "giving away" of the technology.
>
> Yes, the ARPANET project was sponsored (paid for) by the U.S. Dept of
> Defense.  More specifically, the Advanced Research Projects Agency within
> the Department of Defense sponsored it.
>
> ARPA started out as an agency within the Office of the Secretary of Defense
> (OSD), organizationally outside of and, in a certain sense, above the Army,
> Navy and Air Force.  In 1972, the agency moved out of OSD and became  a
> Defense Agency, parallel to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense
> Communications Agency, et al.  In the process the name changed from the
> Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to the Defense Advanced Research
> Projects Agency (DARPA).  No real change in mission or mode of operation.
>
> The sponsorship took two forms.  There were contracts specific to the
> Arpanet and work under existing contracts for research in advanced computer
> science.  The BBN contract to build and deliver the IMPs was the largest
> and clearest example of the former.  The host level work on the other hand
> was done primarily by people working in groups whose primary activity was
> elsewhere, e.g. graphics, AI, multiprocessors, etc., etc.
>
> And the interesting part of this picture is that our primary customer for
> this work was ourselves!  There were no other users.  We built this
> technology to eventually serve everyone, but our own research community
> were the first and most important users.  That was probably more important
> than the single source of funding.
>
> The intellectual property clauses in these contracts placed no constraints
> on the distribution of the results, and the government asserted no rights.
> Moreover, (D)ARPA's oversight focused on the quality of the work.  (D)ARPA
> did not take delivery of the intellectual property and treated it as public
> domain.  And the subtle point here is that this was the environment before
> the results were clear.  There wasn't a moment in time when focus shifted
> to whether to give the technology away.  It was, in essence, given away
> before it was created.  As a specific example, when I wrote the RFC 3
> listing the rules for the RFCs, it didn't occur to me to seek permission.
> Of course, ARPA could have objected, but they didn't, nor did they even
> suggest that we should have had such a discussion.
>
> BBN once tested the above when they attempted to declare their code
> proprietary and prohibit its distribution to a potential competitor.  It
> happened when the Office director, Larry Roberts, had departed and the new
> director, JCR Licklider had not yet come on board, so it fell to me to deal
> with the situation.  After spending quality time with various people, I
> firmly decided that openness was vital to the research community's health.
> Skipping over the interesting details, the code was made available to
> anyone who wanted it.
>
> My involvement in these matters ended when I left the DARPA in 1974.  Bob
> Kahn and Vint Cerf covered a much longer period and can speak to the
> subsequent opportunities or challenges regarding whether to give away the
> Internet technology.
>
> Steve
>
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 9:13 AM Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> I am anxious not to go too far away from the list's charter with respect
>> to history, and I'm aware that part of what I'll say below has more to do
>> with some thinking about the future, so I'll ask a question that does
>> require speculation but is intended especially for people who were directly
>> involved at the time.  (I was an undergrad in part of the period people are
>> discussing in this thread, and by the time I got access I think the
>> situation was different.)
>>
>> The questions or observations are inline below.
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 01:11:28PM -0500, Karl Auerbach via
>> `Internet-history wrote:
>>> "lets try new ideas and see if they work" point of view, while others,
>>> such is ISO/OSI came out of an older bureaucratic tradition.
>> Andrew Russell's argument in _Open Standards and the Digital Age: History,
>> Ideology, and Networks_ (Cambridge UP, 2014) casts this cultural difference
>> in another light: that the OSI approach embodied (or, and I think this is
>> my gloss, "was hobbled by") old-fashioned governance models that were in an
>> important sense more open than the ARPANET/Internet work that led to
>> TCP/IP.  For, he argues, the Internet innovators had to satisfy only one
>> customer: the US Defense Department (or, depending on exactly when,
>> [D]ARPA).  By constrast, the OSI work as well as work that happened before
>> that were international efforts that involved many different parties,
>> sometimes with competing interests, and that used the mechanisms of
>> co-operation used in other places in societies too (like voting etc.) to
>> make decisions.  In this account, the problem OSI and other such efforts
>> faced is basically that they could not move as fast as those who needed
>> only to satisfy a single "customer" of the work.
>>
>> I'd be extremely interested to hear people's reactions to his argument.
>> (If the only version of it you've heard is my third-rate summary above,
>> then I'd urge you to have a closer look at his work before reacting too
>> strongly.  I was sceptical of the view when I first encountered it but I
>> found his scholarship compelling enough that it gave me more than one way
>> to think about those episodes.)
>>
>>> And at the same time our 1960's/1970's sense of "a seamless network
>>> for all of us, for the world" seems to be being assaulted by a new
>>> sense of regionalism; nationalism; religious exclusion, isolation, and
>>> protection; and simple protection against criminals and intruders.
>>> This change is breaking our once seamless network into pieces.
>> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the
>> Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who
>> where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections
>> on the attitudes of the societies at the time.  For instance, kc claffy
>> once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that
>> led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all
>> the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than
>> lock it into any particular corporate ownership.  I know there is another
>> thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking
>> for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in
>> your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that
>> the USG could give such a technology away as they did?  I find it
>> impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either
>> public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term
>> financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits.  (And,
>> to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at
>> the current USG or any people in charge of it.  This has seemed obvious to
>> me for a decade or more.)
>>
>>> The revolution that I am mentioning is coming from users who view "the
>>> net" more as an assemblage of applications that work with one another
>>> - texting, social media, voice/video meetings, maps/navigation, etc.
>> The final question I have (inspired by Karl Auerbach's mail) is admittedly
>> a bit of alternative history.  It seems to me that one of the things that
>> has caused some trouble both in the wider social sense and in the network's
>> operation itself is concentration and consolidation: too few companies with
>> too much money and too much network power (in both the literal Internet
>> sense and the societal-network sense) to resist.
>>
>> Yet to a large extent, those effects follow from the emergence of the web
>> as opposed to the Internet proper.  Now, while the Internet is (I'd argue)
>> fundamentally a distributed technology (and one that encourages growth
>> through greater distribution), the web is in some fundametal way
>> centralizing.  The importance of the host-part of a UR[I|L] is illustrated,
>> even, in the way we talk about web _sites_: the emphasis is on control of
>> publication (contrast this with Usenet).  When hypertext was adapted to the
>> web, one of the things that got left out was the bidirectional nature of
>> the conceptual model, for the obvious reason that links that went in both
>> directions would be mighty hard to implement under distributed control.
>> But what if either there had been a way to inject your back-link to
>> another's page when you made the forward link, of if the web hadn't
>> delivered and we'd ended up in some other technological world?  Is there
>> any reason to suppose that another design would have been more resistant to
>> centralization tham what we have turned out to be?  (If this is too far off
>> the strict historical charter, I understand and will cheerfully take
>> responses off-list if that seems better.)
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> A
>>
>> --
>> Andrew Sullivan
>> ajs at crankycanuck.ca
>> --
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