(Draft for Comment) The Development of the International Computer Network: From Arpanet to Usenet News (On the Nourishment or Impediment of the NET_Commonwealth) by Ronda Hauben email: au329@cleveland.freenet.edu "The method I take...is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative words, and intellectual arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmethic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Conservation of others." --Sir William Petty "Political Arithmetic" "The Nutrition of a Commonwealth consisteth, in the Plenty, and the Distribution of Materials, Condusive to Life." --Thomas Hobbes, "The Leviathan" Preface In the 1600's Sir William Petty, who has been called the father of Scientific Political Economy, pioneered the development of what he called "Political Arithmethic."(1) Political Arithmethic was the application of the scientific method elaborated by Sir Francis Bacon and others of the 16th and 17th century to the problems of the economy of a nation. Political Arithmetic involved the gathering of data distinguished by Number, Weight, or Measure to determine the factors which contribute to the material well being of the people of a society and those which were the impediments to the production of social wealth. Petty only considered those causes which "have a visible Foundation in Nature" and discarded those that were dependent on "the mutable minds, opinions, appetites, and passions of particular men." The International Global network is one of the surprising developments of our time. What are the factors that supported and nourished the growth and development of this network and what are the impediments to continued development and expansion. Introduction Today there is an international computer network that spans the globe and connects universities, researchers and computer workers and users around the world.(2) Twenty five years ago these developments were nonexistent. This is "the largest machine that man has ever constructed, the international global network."(3) This significant world development has occurred in the past 25 years and though it has involved millions of people around the world, others who are not participants in this exciting new global computer community know practically nothing of its existence. This global network is accomplished by, and makes possible, a high degree of automation. Society can now provide for more of the needs of people with comparatively less labor than ever before. Probably one of the most important examples of the promise of this new technology is the creation and expansion of a users news network called Usenet News. Usenet reaches 3 - 6 million people worldwide with over 3,500 different newsgroup subjects and millions of bytes of articles. This news uses no paper, no glue, no postage. Yet, this technology makes it possible for the users themselves to determine and provide for the content and range of information that is conveyed via this new news medium.(4) It also makes possible the rapid response and discussion of articles posted and provides a forum where issues can be freely debated and information exchanged. This news provides for the information exchange and learning needed by the system administrators, programmers, engineers, scientists, and users. In turn, they contribute to the network's development. The continuing growth of Usenet News is a tribute to the millions of pioneers who have developed this new technology of computer automation. J.C.L. Licklider is one of the early network pioneers. His vision of an Intergalactic Computer Network helped to inspire these developments. He and Albert Vezza, describing an earlier network advance, wrote, "Shakespeare could have been foreseeing the present situation in information networking when he said, `...What's past is prologue; what's to come, in yours and my discharge"(5) The story of the network's growth and development contains important lessons for its continued expansion. The development of this international network linking millions of people around the world now stands at a turning point. Will it continue to go forward or will it be detoured? An understanding of the environment and policies that nourished the development of the network provides a scientific foundation on which to base its further development and to serve its continued contribution to the NET_Commonwealth. Part I - The Development of the Arpanet In 1962, the report "On Distributed Communications" by Paul Baran, was published by the Rand Corporation. Baran's research, done under a grant from the U.S. Air Force, discusses how the U.S. military could protect its communications systems from serious attack. He outlines the principle of "redundancy of connectivity" and explores various models of forming communications systems and evaluating their vulnerability.(6) The report proposes a communications system where there would be no obvious central command and control point, but all surviving points would be able to reestablish contact in the event of an attack on any one point. Thus damage to a part would not destory the whole and its effect on the whole would be minimized. One of his recommendations is for a national public utility to transport computer data, much in the way the telephone system transports voice data. "Is it time now to start thinking about a new and possibly non-existant public utility," Baran asks, "a common user digital data communication plant designed specifically for the transmission of digital data among a large set of subscribers?"(7) He cautions against limiting the choice of technology for such a data network to that which is currently in use. He proposes that a packet switching, store and forward technology be developed for a data network. However, because some of his research was then classified, it did not get very wide dissemination. Other researchers were interested in computers and communications, particularly in the computer as a communication device. J.C.R. Licklider was one of the most influencial. He was particularly interested in the man-computer communication relationship. Lick, as he asked people to call him, wondered how the computer could help humans to think and to solve problems. In an article called "Man Computer Symbiosis", he explores how the computer could help humans to do intellectual work. Lick was also interested in the question of how the computer could help humans to communicate better.(8) "In a few years men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," Licklider and Robert Taylor wrote in an article they coauthored. "When minds interact," they observe, "new ideas emerge."(9) People like Paul Baran and J.C.R. Licklider were involved in proposing how to develop computer technology in ways that hadn't been developed before. While Baran's work had been classified, and thus was known only around military circles, Licklider, who had access to such military research and writing, was also involved in the computer research and education community. Larry Roberts, another of the pioneers involved in the early days of network research, explains how Lick's vision of an Intergalactic Computer Network changed his life and career. Lick's contribution, Roberts explains, represented the effort to "define the problems and benefits resulting from computer networking."(10) After informal conversations with Lick, F. Corbato and A. Perlis, at the Second Congress on Information System Sciences in Hot Springs, Virginia, in November 1964, Larry Roberts "concluded that the most important problem in the computer field before us at the time was computer networking; the ability to access one computer from another easily and economically to permit resource sharing." Roberts recalls, "That was a topic in which Licklider was very interested and his enthusiasm infected me."(11) During the early 1960's the U.S. military under its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established two new funding offices, the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) and another for behavioral science. From 1962-64, Licklider took a leave of absence from his position at a Massachusetts research firm, BBN, to give guidance to these two newly created offices. In reviewing this seminal period, Alan Perlis recalls how Lick's philosophy guided ARPA's funding of computer science research. Perlis explains, "I think that we all should be grateful to ARPA for not focusing on very specific projects such as workstations. There was no order issued that said, `We want a proposal on a workstation.' Goodness knows, they would have gotten many of them. Instead, I think that ARPA, through Lick, realized that if you get `n' good people together to do research on computing, you're going to illuminate some reasonable fraction of the ways of proceeding because the computer is such a general instrument." In retrospect Perlis explains, "We owe a great deal to ARPA for not circumscribing directions that people took in those days. I like to believe that the purpose of the military is to support ARPA, and the purpose of ARPA is to support research."(12) Licklider confirms that he was guided in his philosophy by the rationale that a broad investigation of a problem was necessary in order to solve that problem. He explains "There's a lot of reason for adopting a broad delimination rather than a narrow one because if you're trying to find out where ideas come from, you don't want to isolate yourself from the areas that they come from." (13) Licklider attracted others involved in computer research to his vision that computer networking the most important challenge. In 1966-67 Lincoln Labs in Lexington, Mass and SDR in Santa Monica, California, got a grant from the DOD to begin research on linking computers across the continent. Larry Roberts, describing this work, explains, "Convinced that it was a worthwhile goal, we set up a test network to see where the problems would be. Since computer time sharing experiments at MIT (CTSS) and Dartmouth (DTSS) had demonstrated that it was possible to link different computer users to a single computer, the cross country experiment built on this advance."(i.e. Once timesharing was possible, the linking remote computers was also possible.)(14) Roberts reports that there was no trouble linking dissimilar computers. The problems, he claims, were with the telephone lines across the continent, i.e. that the throughput was inadequate to accomplish their goals. Thus their experiment set the basis for justifying research in setting up a nationwide store and forward packet switching data network. During this period, ARPA was funding computer research at a number of U.S. Universities and research labs. A decision was made to include research contractors in the experimental network - the Arpanet. A plan was created for a working network to link the 16 research groups together. A plan for the ARPANET was made available at the October 1967 ACM Symposium on Operating Principles in Gatlingberg, Tennessee. (15) Shortly thereafter, Larry Roberts was recruited to head the ITPO office at ARPA to guide the research. The military set out specifications for the project and asked for bids. They wanted a proposal for a 4 computer network and a design for a network that would include 17 sites. The award for the contract went to the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN). The planned network would make use of mini computers to serve as switching nodes for the host computers at sites that were to be connected to the network. Honeywell mini computers (516's) were chosen for the network of Information Message Processors (IMP's) that would be linked to each other. And each of the IMP's would be linked to a host computer. These IMP's only had 12 kilobytes of memory though they were the most powerful mini computers available at the time. The opening stanzas of a poem by Vint Cerf, an Arpanet pioneer, describe these early days of networking(16): Like distant islands sundered by the sea, We had no sense of one community. We lived and worked apart and rarely knew that others searched with us for knowledge, too. Distant ARPA spurred us in our quest and for our part we worked and put to test new thoughts and theories of computing art; we deemed it science not, but made a start Each time a new machine was built and sold, we'd add it to our list of needs and told our source of funds "Alas! Our knowledge loom will halt 'til it's in our computer room. But, could these new resources not be shared? Let links be built; machines and men be paired! Let distance be no barrier! They set that goal: design and build the ARPANET! On Sept 1, 1969, the first IMP arrived at UCLA which was to be the first site of the new network. It was connected to the Sigma 7 computer at UCLA. Shortly thereafter IMP's were delivered to the other three sites in this initial testbed network. At SRI, the IMP was connected to an SDS-940 computer. At UCSB, the IMP was connected to an IBM 360/75. And at the University of Utah, the fourth site, the IMP was connected a DEC PDP-10. By the end of 1969, the first four IMP's had been connected to the computers at their individual sites and the network connections between the IMP's were operational. The researchers and scientists involved could begin to identify the problems they had to solve to develop a working network.(6) There were programming and technical problems to be solved so the different computers would be able to communicate with each other. Also, there was a need for an agreed upon set of signals that would open up communication channels, allow data to pass thru, and then would close the channels. These agreed upon standards were called protocols. The initial proposal for the research required those involved to work to establish protocols. In April 1969, the first meeting of the group to discuss establishing these protocols took place. They put together a set of documents that would be available to everyone involved for consideration and discussion. They called these Requests for Comment (RFC's) and the first RFC was April, 1969.(17) As the problems of setting up the 4 computer network were identified and solved, the network was expanded to several more sites. (18) By April 1971, there were 15 nodes and 23 hosts in the network. These earliest sites attached to the network were connected to Honeywell DDP-516 IMPs. These were 1 UCLA 2 SRI 3 UCSB 4 U of UTAH 5 BBN 6 MIT 7 RAND Corp 8 SDC ? (Systems Development Corporation) 9 Harvard 10 Lincoln Lab 11 Stanford 12 U of Illinois (Urbana) 13 Case Western Reserve U. 14 CMU 15 NASA-AMES Then smaller minicomputers, the Honeywell 316, were introduced. They were compatible with the 516 IMP but at half the cost) were connected. Some were configured as TIPs (i.e. Terminal IMPs) beginning with: 16 NASA-AMES TIP 17 MITRE TIP (Listing of sites based on a post on Usenet, but the Completion Report also lists Burroughs as one of the first 15 sites.) By January 1973, there were 35 nodes of which 15 were TIPs. Early in 1973, a satellite link connected California with a TIP in Hawaii. With the rapid increase of network traffic, problems were discovered with the reliability of the subnet and corrections had to be worked on. In mid 1973, Norway and England in Europe were added to the net and the resulting problems had to be solved. By September 1973, there were 40 nodes and 45 hosts on the network. And the traffic had expanded from 1 million packets/day in 1972 to 2,900,000 packets/day by September, 1973. By 1977, there were 111 host computers connected via the Arpanet. By 1983 there were 4000.(20) As the network was put into operation, the researchers learned which of their original assumptions and models were inaccurate. For example, BBN describes how they had initially failed to understand that the IMP's would need to do error checking. They explain: "The first four IMPs were developed and installed on schedule by the end of 1969. No sooner were these IMPs in the field than it became clear that some provision was needed to connect hosts relatively distant from an IMP (i.e., up to 2000 feet instead of the expected 50 feet). Thus in early 1970 a `distant' IMP/host interface was developed. Augmented simply by heftier line drivers, these distant interfaces made clear for the first time the fallacy in the assumption that had been made that no error control was needed on the host/IMP interface because there would be no errors on such a local connection."(21) The network was needed to uncover the actual bugs. In describing the importance of a test network, rather than trying to do the research in a laboratory, Alex McKenzie and David Walden, in their article "Arpanet, the Defense Data Network, and Internet" write: "Errors in coding control were another problem. However carefully one designs, codes, and performs quality control, errors can still slip through. Fortunately, with a large number of IMPs in the network, most of these errors are found quickly because they occur so frequently. For instance, a bug in an IMP code that occurs once a day in one IMP, occurs every 15 min in a 100-IMP network. Unfortunately, some bugs still will remain. If a symptom of a bug is detected somewhere in a 100-IMP network once a week (often enough to be a problem), then it will happen only once every 2 years in a single IMP in a development lab for a programmer trying to find the source of the symptom. Thus, achieving a totally bug-free network is very difficult.(22) In October 1972, the First International Conference on Computer Communications was held in Washington, D.C. A public demonstration of the ARPANET was given setting up an actual node with 40 machines. Representatives from projects around the world including Canada, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain and the U.S. discussed the need to begin work on establishing agreed upon protocols. The InterNetwork Working Group (INWG) was created to begin discussions for such a common protocol and Vinton Cerf, who was involved with UCLA Arpanet was chosen as the first Chairman. The vision proposed for the architectural principles for an international interconnection of networks was "a mess of independent, autonomous networks interconnected by gateways, just as independent circuits of ARPANET are interconnected by IMPs."(23) The network continued to grow and expand. In 1975 the ARPANET was transferred to the control of the DCA (Defence Communications Agency). Evaluating the success of ARPANET research, Licklider recalled that he felt ARPA had been run by an enlightened set of military men while he was involved with it."I don't want to brag about ARPA," he explains, " It is in my view, however, a very enlightened place. It was fun to work there. I think I never encountered brighter, more creative people, than the inhabitants of the third floor E-ring of the Pentagon. But that, I'll say, was a long time ago, and I simply don't know how bright and likeable they are now. But ARPA didn't constrain me much."(24) A post on Usenet by Eugene Miya, who was a student at one of the early Arpa sites, conveys the exciting environment of the early Arpanet. He writes: "It was an effort to connect different kinds of computers back when a school or company had only one (that's 1) computer. The first configuration of the ARPAnet had only 4 computers, I had luckily selected a school at one of those 4 sites: UCLA/Rand Corp, UCSB (us), SRI, and the U of Utah. Who? The US DOD: Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA was the sugar daddy of computer science. Some very bright people were given some money, freedom, and had a lot of vision. It not only started computer networks, but also computer graphics, computer flight simulation, head mounted displays, parallel processing, queuing models, VLSI, and a host of other ideas. Far from being evil warmongers, some neat work was done. Why? Lots of reasons: intellectual curiosity, the need to have different machines communicate, study fault tolerance of communications systems in the event of nuclear war, share and connect expensive resources, very soft ideas to very hard ideas.... I first saw the term "internetwork" in a paper by folk from Xerox PARC (another ARPANET host). The issue was one of interconnecting Ethernets (which had the 256 [slightly less] host limitation). Schoch's CACM worm program paper is a good one. I learned much of this with the help of the NIC (Network Information Center). This does not mean the Internet is like this today. I think the early ARPAnet was kind of a wondrous neat place, sort of a golden era. You could get into other people's machines with a minimum of hassle (someone else paid the bills). No more.... He continues: Where did I fit in? I was a frosh nuclear engineering major, spending odd hours (2am-4am, sometimes on Fridays and weekends) doing hackerish things rather than doing student things: studying or dating, etc. I put together an interactive SPSS and learned a lot playing chess on an MIT[- MC] DEC-10 from an IBM-360. Think of the problems: 32-bit versus 36-bit, different character set [remember I started with EBCDIC], FTP then is largely FTP now, has changed very little. We didn't have text editors available to students on the IBM (yes you could use the ARPAnet via punched card decks). Learned a lot. I wish I had hacked more.(25) One of the surprising developments to the researchers of the ARPANET was the great popularity of electronic mail. Analyzing the reasons for this unanticipated benefit from their network development, Licklider and Vezza write, "By the fall of 1973, the great effectiveness and convenience of such fast, informed messages services...had been discovered by almost everyone who had worked on the development of the ARPANET -- and especially by the then Director of ARPA, S.J. Lukasik, who soon had most of his office directors and program managers communicating with him and with their colleagues and their contractors via the network. Thereafter, both the number of (intercommunicating) electronic mail systems and the number of users of them on the ARPANET increased rapidly."(26) "One of the advantages of the message system over letter mail," they add, "was that, in an ARPANET message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly, even to an older person in a superior position and even to a person one did not know very well, and the recipient took no offense. The formality and perfection that most people expect in a typed letter did not become associated with network messages, probably because the network was so much faster, so much more like the telephone... Among the advantages of the network message services over the telephone were the fact that one could proceed immediately to the point without having to engage in small talk first, that the message services produced a preservable record, and that the sender and receiver did not have to be available at the same time.(27) Describing email, the authors of the Completion Report write: The largest single surprise of the ARPANET program has been the incredible popularity and success of network mail. There is little doubt that the techniques of network mail developed in connection with the ARPANET program are going to sweep the country and drastically change the techniques used for intercommunication in the public and private sectors.(28) Not only was the network used to see what the actual problems would be, the communication it made possible gave the researchers the ability to collaborate to deal with these problems. Summarizing the important breakthrough represented by the Arpanet, they conclude: "This ARPA program has created no less than a revolution in computer technology and has been one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by ARPA. The program has initiated extensive changes in the Defense Department's use of computers as well as in the use of computers by the entire public and private sectors, both in the United States and around the world. Just as the telephone, the telegraph, and the printing press had far-reaching effects on human intercommunication, the widespread utilization of computer networks which has been catalyzed by the ARPANET project represents a similarly far-reaching change in the use of computers by mankind. The full impact of the technical changes set in motion by this project may not be understood for many years."(29) Notes for Part I (1) "The Writings of Sir William Petty," ed Hull, London, 1899, reprint edition Kelley Publishers. (2) "Internet Society News," vol 1, no. 2, Spring, 1992, back inside cover. (3) Ithiel de Sola Pool, "Technologies Without Boundaries," Cambridge, 1990, p. 56. (4) See for example, Michael Hauben, "Social Forces Behind the Development of Usenet News," The Amateur Computerist, vol 5, no. 1-2. (5) "Applications of Information Network", Proceedings of the IEEE, vol 66, No. 11, November, 1978, p.57. (6) Ibid., September, 1962, pg. 2. (7) Ibid., p. 40. (8) "Man Computer Symbiosis", in "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider 1915-1990." (9) See "The Computer as a Communication device" in "In Memoriam:J.C.R. Licklider 1915-1990", p. 21. (10) See "The Arpanet and Computer Networks" reprinted in "A History of Personal Workstations" ed by Adele Goldberg, N.Y. 1988, p. 143. (11) Ibid., p. 143-144. See also "The Arpanet and Computer Networks," Ibid. (12) "Workstations", Ibid., p. 129. (13) "Some Reflections on Early History," Ibid., p. 118) (14) See for example, "Toward a Cooperative Network of Time- Shared Computers," by Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts, Proceedings - FJCC, 1966, p. 426. (15) Roberts, p. 146. (16) From "Requiem for the Arpanet" by Vint Cerf reprinted in "ConneXions," vol 3, no. 10, Oct. 1989, p.27. (17) See "The Completion Report," by F. Heart, A. McKenzie, J. McQuillian, and D. Walden, BBN Report 4799, January 4, 1978. (18) Ibid. (19) Joel Levin on Oct. 17, 1990. (20) See "Completion Report" and "Arpanet, the Defense Data Network, and Internet" in the "Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications," vol 1. (21) "The Completion Report," p. III-55. (22) See "Completion Report" and "Arpanet, the Defense Data Network, and Internet" in the "Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications," vol 1, p 361. (23) Ibid. p. 361-2. (24) "Workstations," p. 126. (25) From Eugene Miya in alt.folklore.computers, comp.misc, Re: Internet: The origins, Oct 16 1990. (26) "Applications", p. 44. (27) Ibid. (28) "Completion Report", III, p. 113-116. (29) Ibid., I, p. 2. -- Ronda Hauben write for email copy of Winter/Spring 1993 issue Amateur Computerist articles include Interview on Usenet and C News ronda@umcc.umich.edu Sir Francis Bacon and Shorter Hours Bill or ae547@yfn.ysu.edu Social Forces behind Usenet News From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: alt.amateur-comp,sci.econ,alt.folklore.computers,news.admin.misc Subject: Re: Draft From Arpanet to Usenet (pt 1 of 2)(long) Date: 11 Aug 93 19:41:47 GMT >Alan Perlis recalls how Lick's >philosophy guided ARPA's funding of computer science research. >Perlis explains, "I think that we all should be grateful to ARPA >for not focusing on very specific projects such as workstations. >There was no order issued that said, `We want a proposal on a >workstation.' I thought Perlis passed away a few years ago (or am I wrong?) If so this sounds eerily current. If I'm correct courtesy might dictate explaining this to the reader even if it's potentially a little redundant with the footnotes. One would hate to touch off a spate of inquiries. In the comparison with paper mail it might be interesting to dig up the story about how the UK postal service insisted on a terminal on the ARPAnet link to GB in order to monitor whether or not messages were in fact professionally related as claimed and not just chit-chat avoiding postage. There was a lot of fuss about this. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember the repeated warnings in the late 70's not to upset them or else the link to UCL might be cut off etc. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | uunet!world!bzs Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD From: hauben@namaste.cc.columbia.edu (Michael Hauben) Newsgroups: alt.amateur-comp,alt.culture.internet,alt.folklore.computers,comp.misc,alt.cyberspace Subject: DRAFT paper on the Vision Behind the Development of the Net Date: 9 May 1994 13:48:38 GMT DRAFT OF The Vision of Interactive Computing and the Future Comments appreciated By Michael Hauben hauben@columbia.edu Where has the Information Superhighway come from? This is a very important question which the Clinton and Gore Administration seem to be ignoring. However understanding this history is a crucial step towards building the network of the future. It is my goal in this presentation to uncover the vision behind the Internet, Usenet and other associated Physical and Logical networks. While the nets are basically young (the ARPANET started 25 years before 1994), this 25 year growth is substantial. The ARPANET was the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency's experimental network connecting the mainframes of Universities and other Department of Defense's (DoD) contractors. The ARPANET initially started out as a test bed of computer networking, communications protocols, and information/computer and data sharing. However, what it developed into was something of a completely different nature. The most wide use of the ARPANET was for human-to-human communication using electronic mail (e-mail) and discussion lists (popular lists were the wine-tasters and sci-fi lovers lists). The human communications aspect of the ARPANET continues to be today's most popular usage of the 'Net by a vast variety of people through e-mail, Usenet News discussion groups, Mailing Lists, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and so on. However, the ARPANET was the product of previous research itself. Before the 1960s computers operated in batch mode. This meant that a user had to provide a program on punch cards to the local computer center. Often a programmer had to wait over a day in order to see the results from his or her input. In addition if there were any mistakes in the creation of the punched cards, the stack or individual card had to be repunched and resubmitted, which would take another day. This does not account for bugs in the code, which someone only finds out after attempting to compile the code. This was a very unefficient way of utilizing the power of the computer from the viewpoint of a human, in addition to discouraging those unfamiliar with computers. This led to different people thinking of ways to alter the interface between people and computers. The idea of time sharing developed among some of the computer research communities. Time sharing amounts to multiple people utilizing the computer (then mainframes) simultaneously. Time sharing operated by giving the impression that the user is the only one on the computer. This is executed by having the computer divy out slices of CPU time to all the users in a sequential manner. Research in Time sharing was happening around the country at different research centers in early 1960s. Some examples were CTSS (Computer Time Sharing System) at MIT, DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System) at Dartmouth, a system at BBN, and so on. J.C.R. Licklider, who was the initial director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the time, thought of timesharing as Interactive Computing. Interactive computing meant the user had a way to communicate and respond to the computer's responses in a way that Batch Processing did not allow. Both Robert Taylor and Larry Roberts, future successors of Licklider as director of IPTO, pinpoint Licklider as the originator of the vision which set ARPA's priorities and goals and basically drove ARPA to help develop the concept of networking computers In an Interview conducted by the Charles Babbage Institute, Roberts said: "what I concluded was that we had to do something about communications, and that really, the idea of the galactic network that Lick talked about, probably more than anybody, was something that we had to start seriously thinking about. So in a way networking grew out of Lick's talking about that, although Lick himself could not make anything happen because it was too early when he talked about it. But he did convince me it was important." (CBI Oral Interview, Roberts, pg 7) Taylor also pointed out the importance of Licklider's vision to future network development in a CBI conducted interview: "I don't think ... anyone who's been in that DARPA position since [Licklider] has had the vision that Licklider had. His being at that place at that time is a testament to the tenuousness of it all. It was really a fortunate circumstance. I think most of the significant advances in computer technology, especially in the systems part of computer science over the years -- including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC where we built the first distributed personal computer system -- were simply extrapolations of Licklider's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he's really the father of it all. And you'll never get him to admit that, because of his modesty." (CBI Oral Interview, Taylor, pg. 8) Crucial to the definition of today's Networks were the thoughts awakened in the minds of those researching timesharing. Those experimenting with timesharing began to think about issues related to timesharing. One topic which arose in people's minds was that of the issues involved with the formation of communities over the timesharing systems which were being developed. Fernando Corbato and Robert Fano wrote, "The time-sharing computer system can unite a group of investigators in a cooperative search for the solution to a common problem, or it can serve as a community pool of knowledge and skill on which anyone can draw according to his needs. Projecting the concept on a large scale, one can conceive of such a facility as an extraordinarily powerful library serving an entire community -- in short, an intellectual public utility." ("Time-sharing on Computers" in _Information_, pg. 76) Robert Taylor spoke about some of the new circumstances that time sharing made possible that extended beyond the expected advances: "They were just talking about a network where they could have a compatibility across these systems, and at least do some load sharing, and some program sharing, data sharing -- that sort of thing. Whereas, the thing that struck me about the timesharing experience was that before there was a timesharing system, let's say at MIT, then there were a lot of individual people who didn't know each other who were interested in computing in one way or another, and who were doing whatever they could, however they could. As soon as the timesharing system became usable, these people began to know one another, share a lot of information, and ask of one another, "How do I use this? Where do I find that?" It was really phenomenal to see this computer become a medium that stimulated the formation of a human community. ... And so, here ARPA had a number of sites by this time, each of which had its own sense of community and was digitally isolated from the other one. I saw a phrase in the Licklider memo. The phrase was in a totally different context -- something that he referred to as an "intergalactic network." I asked him about this later... recently, in fact I said, "Did you have a networking of the ARPANET sort in mind when you used that phrase?" He said, "No, I was thinking about a single timesharing system that was intergalactic..." (CBI Oral Interview, Taylor, pg 24) As Taylor recounts, the users utilizing the timesharing systems did, usually unexpectedly, form a new community. People now were connected to others who were interested in these new computing systems. Licklider was one of the first users of the new timesharing systems, and took the time to play around with them. However, Fernando Corbato called Licklider a visionary, and not an implementor. This was helpful because with his vision, Licklider helped establish the priorities and direction that ARPA's IPTO was attempting to approach with their research monies. Many of the Interviewees in the CBI Interviews said that ARPA's monies were given in those days to help seed research which would be helpful to the general society in general, and only secondary to the military. Licklider's visions helped to inspire bright researchers working on computer related topics. Roberts even goes as far to say that Licklider's work (and that of the IPTO directors after him) educated the people who were to become the leaders in the computer industry in general. Roberts relates Licklider's vision and how future IPTO directors continued Licklider's legacy: "Well, I think that the one influence is the one I mentioned in relation to the net, that is, the production of people in the computer field that are trained, and knowledgeable, and capable, and that form the basis for the progress the United States has made in the computer field. That production of people started with Lick, when he started the IPTO program and started the big university programs. It was really due to Lick, in large part, because I think it was that early set of activities that I continued with that produced the most people with the big university contracts. That produced a base for them to expand their whole department, and produced excitement in the university" (CBI Oral Interview, Roberts, pg 29) The influence on Academia led to a profound effect on the future of the computer industry. Roberts continues: "So it was clear that that was a big impact on the universities and therefore, in the industry. You can almost track all those people and see what effect that has had. The people from those projects are in large part the leaders throughout the industry" (Ibid., pg. 30) Licklider's vision of the "Intergalactic Network" or of a time-sharing system connecting all of the computer using communities across multi-galaxy's really spawned the idea of interconnecting the different time-sharing systems by networking them. This networking would allow those on the different time-sharing systems to share data, programs, and later their research, other ideas and even later anything that could be written out. Licklider and Taylor collaborated on an article titled "The Computer as a Communications Device" which foresaw today's Net. They wrote: "We have seen the beginnings of communication through a computer - communication among people at consoles located in the same room or on the same university campus or even at distantly separated laboratories of the same research and development organization. This kind of communication - through a single multiaccess computer with the aid of telephone lines - is beginning to foster cooperation and promote coherence more effectively than do present arrangements for sharing computer programs by exchanging magnetic tape by messenger or mail." (Licklider & Taylor, pg. 28) Later in the article, they point out that the interconnection of computers led to a much broader interconnection than might have been expected. A new community is described when they write: "The collection of people, hardware, and software - the multiaccess computer together with its local community of users - will become a node in a geographically distributed computer network. Let us assume for a moment that such a network has been formed....Through the network of message processors, therefore, all the large computers can communicate with one another. And through them, all the members of the supercommunity can communicate - with other people, with programs, with data, or with a selected combinations of those resources." (IBID.,pg. 32) Licklider and Roberts exhibit their interest in more than just hardware and software when they continue to think about the new social dynamics the connections of disperse computers and people will create. The authors continue: "[The communities] will be communities not of common location , but of common interest. In each field, the overall community of interest will be large enough to support a comprehensive system of field-oriented programs and data." (IBID., pg. 38) In exploring this community of common affinity, the pair look for the possible positive reasons to connect to and be a part of these new computer facilitated communities: "First, life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity. Second, communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable. Third, much communication and interaction will be with programs and programming models, which will be (a) highly responsive, (b) supplementary to one's own capabilities, rather than competitive, and (c) capable of representing progressively more complex ideas without necessarily displaying all the levels of their structure at the same time -- and which will therefore be both challenging and rewarding. And, fourth, there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information, with all its fields and disciplines, will be open to him, with programs ready to guide him or to help him explore." (IBID., pg 40) Roberts and Taylor conclude their article on a prophetic question. The advantages that computer networks make possible will only happen if these advantages are available to all who want to make use of them. The question is posed as follows: "For the society, the impact will be good or bad depending mainly on the question: Will `to be on line' be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of `intelligence amplification,' the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity." (IBID., pg. 40) The question which is raised is one of access. The authors try to point out that the positive effects of computer networking would only come about if the ability to use the networks is made easy and available. Lastly they hold that access will probably be made available because of the global benefits which they predict would ensue. They end by writing: "if the network idea should prove to do for education what a few have envisioned in hope, if not in concrete detailed plan, and if all minds should prove to be responsive, surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure." (IBID., pg. 40) Licklider and Taylor raise an important point of saying access should be made available to all who want to use the computer networks. Coming back to today, it is important to ask if the National Information Infrastructure is being designed with the principle of making equality of access as important. As I have identified in this presentation, there was a vision of the interconnection and interaction of extremely diverse communities guiding the creation of the original Arpanet. In the design of the expansion of the Network to our society as a whole, it is important to keep the original vision in mind to consider if the vision was correct, or if it was just important in the initial development of networking technologies and techniques. However, very little emphasis has been placed on either the study of Licklider's vision or the role and advantages the Nets have played up to this point. In addition, the public has not been a part of the planning for the new initiatives which the federal government is currently planning. This is a plea to you to demand more of a part in the development of the future of the Net. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Hauben Columbia College'95 Editor of Amateur Computerist Newsletter by day hauben@columbia.edu by night Netizen's Cyberstop From: rh120@namaste.cc.columbia.edu (Ronda Hauben) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: On the Early Days of Usenet:1of3(long) Date: 4 Oct 1995 19:58:17 GMT Following is a second draft of an article I am working on about the early days of Usenet for the updated Netizens book. I would appreciate any comments or suggestions as I am trying to finish a revised draft by Oct. 9. Thanks to those who commented on an earlier draft, as the comments were very helpful and I have tried to incorporate the suggestions into this draft. Ronda ON THE EARLY DAYS OF USENET: THE ROOTS OF THE COOPERATIVE ONLINE CULTURE (Part 1 of 3) by Ronda Hauben rh120@columbia.edu "Without a historical perspective, it's quite easy to get the wrong impression of how all this came to pass. It is the result of the work of a large number of individuals, some of whom have been at it for the last 20 years." Lauren Weinstein, 1990 "Even if we have shifted away from discussing human networks, we are getting a first hand EXPERIENCE of what they are through this mailing list. No amount of `a priori' theorizing of their nature,' has as much explanatory power as personal experience. By observing what happens when connectivity is provided to a large mass of people in which they can FREELY voice their ideas, doubts, and opinions, a lot of insight is obtained into very important issues of mass intercommunication." Human-Nets Mailing List, 03 June 1981, Jorge Phillips, Subject: administrivia Usenet was born in 1979. It has grown from a design conceived of by two graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, at Duke University in North Carolina, to a logical network linking millions of people and computers to over 9,500 different newsgroups and millions of bytes of articles available at any given time at hundreds of thousands of sites around the world. Yet little is generally known about how Usenet began and how it developed. Computer Chess - The Mini Slays the Mainframe Tom Truscott had a dream. As a kid he had read the book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine. He decided that it would be neat to have a homework machine. Some things caught his imagination and this particular goal not only set him on a course that would affect his future, but it also would have an unexpected impact on the rest of the world. By the summer of 1970, before his senior year in high school, Truscott had enrolled in a summer computer program that gave him his first chance to use a computer and to learn to program in BASIC. "My first large program played checkers," he remembers of that summer.(1) "It didn't play all that well," he admits, but it introduced him to some of the power of computers. As a college freshman at Duke University the next year Truscott met another student in his chemistry lab who was an excellent chess player. Truscott describes how he told his chemistry lab partner Bruce Wright that "we could write a computer chess program that would beat Bobby Fisher." Wright "didn't think so, but we started writing the program anyway," Truscott continues. "I was interested because of the computing challenge and no doubt the fame we would garner by defeating Fisher, and I guess Bruce was interested because he wanted to learn computing." Truscott describes how the two undergraduates spent "a LOT of time" writing their chess program and in the process they learned a lot about how not to write programs. Truscott was interested in how game programs were like robots since they functioned as autonomous creatures. "At tournaments," he points out, "the program tells me what moves to make for it, asks me how much time it has left on the clock," etc. And writing a software robot, Truscott observes, "is a lot easier than building a real one." Once Truscott and Wright had set their sights on creating a championship chess program, Truscott set out to research what work had been done on the problem. He found that Claude Shannon had written "a very early paper on how to construct a chess playing machine."(2) "It was remarkably farsighted given the state of computing then," Truscott remembers. The next oldest paper he found was from 1958 by someone who implemented a program similar to Shannon's proposal. "It played terribly," he recalls.(3) Also, by Spring of 1974, Truscott had joined the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) to receive notification of the computer chess tournaments. Reading through the journal "Communications of the ACM" in 1974, he came across an article about a new operating system created by research programmers at Bell Labs.(4) In the article, he noticed that a program created by a Bell Labs team ran in the background sopping up idle CPU time and solving simple chess endgames (for example King and Rook vs. King). Truscott explains how there was no chance he and Wright could do something like that on the mainframe computer they were using, since it cost 20 cents per second. But he notes that their mainframe was about the fastest there was and could compute rings around the DEC PDP-11 that the Unix operating system ran on. He and Wright created their program for the IBM System 370 Model 160 MVT/TSO mainframe computer system at Duke. It had three megabytes of main memory, which Truscott notes was later upgraded to "4 megabytes for a mere $100,000." That was, according to Truscott, "Pretty much the top of the line at the time. We did our development in batch mode," he remembers, "The source code was on punched cards and the compiled code was stored on disk." And in tournaments, he and Wright used the IBM timesharing mode TSO. The first computer chess tournament Truscott and Wright competed in was the North American Chess Championships held at the ACM Annual Conference in San Diego, California in November 1974. By then, Truscott was in his senior year at Duke. He and Wright named their chess program Duchess. Following is Truscott's description of his first tournament and how he met one of the most respected programmers in the Unix community during that tournament. Truscott writes: "There were twelve teams competing in the tournament. We were on a stage in a large room with seating for spectators. Each team had a computer terminal (something like a dot-matrix printer with a keyboard in front and an acoustic modem on the back). And a telephone. Boy were those phone calls expensive. But the ACM was picking up the tab, and Duke was giving us the computer time. At the 1974 tournament, we knocked off MIT's TECH-II in the first round. They had come in second the previous year, and we were a newcomer, so that was something of an upset. In the second round we got clobbered by the perennial champ, CHESS 4.0 from Northwestern University. In the third round we played Bell Labs' Belle. It was called T. Belle at that point. I had met the author earlier, before the second round, when he showed me how good his program was at solving mating problems. I wasn't that interested in chess, but humored him while he pulled a chess position out of a library and had the program find a mate in 5 (or some such). I guess if I actually played chess I would have been impressed. So when the third round began, Bruce Wright and I were on one side of a table, and Ken Thompson and someone else from Bell Labs (who years later I realized was Brian Kernighan), were on the other. I noticed that when Ken Thompson logged on, the Bell Labs computer printed: Chess tonight, please don't compute. I mentioned that that was really neat to be able to get the comp center to put out a notice like that. He said something non-commital in response. So the game began. A few hours and a few thousand dollars later we really had Belle on the ropes. All it had left was a lone king and we were about to queen a pawn! But then our program ABENDed (core dumped) in a way that caused the phone line to drop. We dialed back in and set things up, same thing. Every so often it would actually make a move. But making the phone call was slow (we had to ask for an outside line from the hotel operator) and painful (rotary dial you know) and eventually our program lost on time." After the tournament was over, Truscott and Wright examined what had happened and they observed that the problem was not with their program, but rather with a bug in the TSO operating system on their mainframe. "Thus was our mighty mainframe slain by a minicomputer," he admitted, as they had lost the competition because the operating system of their mainframe computer had proven inferior to the operating system of the mini computer used by the Bell Labs Team. "But I didn't realize it was UNIX," Truscott recalls, noting that the victory went to the Bell Labs team and their mini computer because of the power of their Unix operating system. Truscott and Wright competed in every ACM Computer Chess Competition [CCC] from 1974 to 1980. The next time he met Ken Thompson was at the 1976 Unix Users Group meeting at Harvard. "That was great fun," he remembers. There were about 80 attendees. "Somewhere along the way I made the connection between Belle and Thompson and UNIX." By this time Truscott was a graduate student at Duke where he and others had just installed Unix Version 6 on the CS Department computer. "I was also at the 1978 UNIX Users Group meeting at Columbia University, and both Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were there," Truscott continues, "Thompson also competed in the 1978 ACM CCC. He had some special chess hardware but it was no match for the much-improved mainframe programs." "Because of our mutual interests," Truscott recalls, "Thompson would even call up our computer at Duke from time to time, and `write' me. That was pretty intense, my trying to pick perfect sentences to send along to the genius at the other end. I think it was during one of those `write' sessions in early 1979, that he asked if I would be interested in a summer job." Truscott accepted Thompson's offer and spent the summer of 1979 at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the birthplace of Unix. That Summer, a distribution of the Unix Operating System, Unix Version 7 was made available to sites with licenses from AT&T to use Unix. Included in the Unix V7 distribution were a number of Unix tools such as "sed" "awk" "uucp" and the Bourne Shell. These tools were very helpful and would prove invaluable in the creation of Usenet. Truscott found that Bell Labs provided an exciting and supportative environment. Following is his account of this important summer in 1979 that he spent playing volleyball, eating pizza and working on a daily basis with many of the pioneers of the Unix community. He writes: "Woke up at 11 am. Got to Bell Labs at noon so I could play volleyball out on the front lawn with Mike Lesk and Steve Bourne and other folks. After a few weeks, the security folks told us they couldn't have a regulated monopoly running around loose like that. Lunch at 1pm in the Bell Labs restaurant. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and Greg Chesson were regulars. They had lunch at 1pm because sometimes they didn't get to work until then. Sometimes Dennis Ritchie would entertain us with some horror story about a non-UNIX system he dealt with recently...." "At 2pm the day began, which involved doing pretty much whatever we wanted. Ritchie was working on `streams'. I think Ken Thompson was working on typesetting software but mostly working on a chess machine....Often at 7pm a group would go out for dinner (they liked pizza). Occasionally someone would host dinner at their home. Afterwards I would go back to the Labs and work until midnight. And the next day I would get up `at the crack of noon' as Thompson put it." As the summer ended, Truscott left Bell Labs and returned to Duke. Using Unix to Create an Online Commmunity Truscott, describing his return to Duke, writes, "Of course when the summer was over and I was back at Duke, one of the first things I did was arrange a uucp connection to research. They called us nightly, which was great." Truscott and Dennis Ritchie set up a uucp connection between "duke" a CS Department computer site at Duke in Durham, North Carolina, and "research" a computer site at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The uucp program that was part of the V7 distribution of Unix made it possible to send email and files to other Unix sites using telephone lines as long as the sending computer had an autodialing modem and the receiving computer had an auto answering modem. But these links did not make up for the fact that by Fall 1979, Truscott was back at Duke and no longer in the exciting environment of the birthplace of Unix. After having worked at Bell Labs for Ken Thompson, where, as in Truscott's words, "I was in UNIX heaven the whole time, returning to Duke in the fall meant the end of that." Also, that summer he had attended the Unix User's Group meeting in Toronto, Canada. Once back at Duke the primary connection with the Unix community was through the Usenix newsletter ";Login:". This newsletter, however, hadn't appeared in a while. That Fall, another Duke graduate student, Jim Ellis installed the latest Unix (V7) edition on a Duke Computer Science computer. It broke many old programs, including a public domain `items' program that had provided a local bulletin board. Truscott recalls how the program allowed items to be entered into one of several categories. "It had a number of problems," he explains, "including a 512 byte limit per item, so we were thinking about writing a completely new program. Then we could contribute it to the next user group tape and hopefully achieve some minor level of fame." Truscott attributes the creation of Usenet to the confluence of these events in Fall 1979. He describes a long rambling conversation he and Ellis had one night considering these circumstances. The idea for Usenet developed during their discussion. Soon afterwards, Truscott and Ellis met with two other local Unix enthusiasts, Dennis Rockwell, who was a graduate student and worked in the Physiology Department at Duke, and Steve Bellovin, who was a graduate student at the neighboring University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. They decided on the transfer format, i.e., on what an article would look like to make it possible to ship files via computers using uucp, and they agreed on the basic functionality of the software they would need to create an online network. Bellovin wrote a shell script using Unix to test the design concept. Describing the early work to create Usenet, Bellovin writes: "The release of the uucp program with V7 UNIX provided the initial impetus. So did the Bourne shell. So the very first version of net news was a 3-page shell script. It supported multiple newsgroups, cross-postings, and subscription lists implemented as environmental variables. As best as I can tell, this script has not survived."(5) Bellovin emphasizes how the ease of testing software design facilitated by Unix made it possible to create Usenet. "It's worth noting now that given the speed (or lack thereof) of the machines we had we utterly relied on the ease of writing shell scripts to experiment with protocol variants. Compilation would have taken much too long." Commenting about the early plan for Usenet, Bellovin notes: "We estimated a maximum size of 100 sites, and 1-2 articles a day, net-wide...you couldn't read things out of order. The goal there (and in many other spots) was to have software free of databases. Instead, we chose to let the file system do the work." Bellovin recalls why a news program to replace the one they had used with Unix V6 was needed. "Another motivation," he writes, "was some sort of local news system. On V6, Duke and UNC had a local news system that came from somewhere. But articles were limited to 512 bytes, and we didn't carry it forward to V7. A prime requirement was that there be an efficient way to test for the presence of news (hence the checknews program)." The Duke and University of North Carolina graduate students hoped to contribute their news program to the Usenet community to be used with Unix V7. According to Truscott, the shell script was slow, but worked. They also decided on terminology such as 'newsgroups' to describe the subject areas they would have as part of their network. "That was probably due to the newsletter analogy," he explains since "this was long before the PC and bulletin boards."(6) Stephen Daniel, another Duke graduate student soon became involved and made a substantial contribution to the work. Truscott writes that Daniel "created the dotted newsgroup structure that we know today," for the newsnaming scheme (i.e. NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx) Also, Steve Daniel wrote one of the earliest versions of the netnews software in the C programming language. This came to be known as "A-News". Truscott and Wright continued to participate in the Chess Tournaments and in 1980 they competed in the 3rd world Computer Chess Championship held in Linz, Austria. Thompson and Joe Condon, who was a technician at Bell Labs, were also in the competition. Truscott notes that Thompson and Condon "had completed their hardware chess machine and snagged first place. Duchess came in third. And Claude Shannon was in attendance, and even handed out the trophies at the awards ceremony. Afterwards we all went over to a TV studio to watch a West German TV special on computer chess, and the championship. Claude Shannon and his wife were very engaging people. Someone took a photo of all of us, I have a copy buried somewhere." When Usenet was created, the newsgroup NET.chess was created as one of the early newsgroups. By developing Usenet, the Unix community became the force behind the creation of an online community that would welcome participants into the cooperative culture that the Unix pioneers had found important in helping them to create Unix. Graduate students at Duke and the University of North Carolina were able to use Unix to create an online community to provide needed technical and social support. They later named this users network Usenet. The earliest map for Usenet was made up of the first two computers that were sites for Usenet: duke - unc The sites were: 1) duke Duke University 2) unc University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Another computer at Duke joined the Network. The computer was named phs. It was in the Physiology Department at Duke Medical School. The map of Usenet then became: duke - unc \ / phs The third site was: 3) phs Physiology Department of the Duke Medical School Soon connections were set up with computers at Bell Labs. The computer site "research" and then "vax135" at the Labs were added to Usenet. In the summer of 1980, Mark Horton, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, brought the computer site "ucbvax" onto Usenet.(7) A map of Usenet during the Summer 1980 shows the sites then connected: reed phs \ / \ uok --- duke --unc / \ research vax135 | ucbvax The additional sites were: 4) reed Reed College 5) uok University of Oklahoma 6) research Bell Labs Murray Hill 7) vax135 Bell Labs Murray Hill 8) ucbvax University of California at Berkeley Bell Telephone Labs (Murray Hill) operating the computer named "research" was the first site to pick up the phone bills for calls between "ucbvax" at the University of California at Berkeley and "duke" at Duke University via "research." Horton writes: "The first cross country link was from duke to research, then from research to ucbvax, all on research's nickel."(8) Horton recalls how amazed he was to get email messages from Usenet pioneers at Duke and the University of North Carolina just a few hours after he had sent them messages, thanks to the connectivity provided by the Bell Labs computer. "I remember," he writes, "while at Berkeley, exchanging email with the original `A-News' developers and being amazed that I could get a reply back a few hours later, even though `research' was polling both `duke' and `ucbvax' to pick up waiting mail." The first newsgroups on Usenet, according to Truscott, were known as NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx. After Horton joined Usenet, he began feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet. Mailing lists from the ARPANET fed into Usenet were identified as FA.xxxx newsgroups. Truscott notes that, "Only when ucbvax joined the net, did `fa' appear." Truscott explains that he didn't know about the ARPANET mailing lists until Horton joined Usenet. At first the Usenet community could only read these ARPANET mailing lists, but couldn't contribute to them. "It was a one-way gateway - ARPANET into Usenet only, done with recnews, as I recall," writes Horton.(9) But at least it was possible for the Usenet community to follow the interesting discussions carried on via the ARPANET mailing lists during this early period of Usenet. Bellovin explains why feeding the ARPANET mailing lists into Usenet was so important for the development both of Usenet and of the ARPANET. "Actually in my opinion," Bellovin writes, "one of the key elements in the early growth of Usenet was when Mark Horton started feeding the SF lovers and human-nets mailing lists into newsgroups. Those provided a critical mass of traffic and served as a lure to attract new sites." He describes how "The ARPANET was supposed to be a self-contained entity, and only approved sites were allowed to connect." Therefore, the connection between Usenet and the ARPANET broke important new ground. Bellovin writes, "Mail to and from Usenet only sites, was an interesting test case that *wasn't* stamped out, though I think it skated on some very thin ice for a while." The "ucbvax" site at the University of California at Berkeley provided a crucial gateway between Usenet and the ARPANET. The University of California at Berkeley could provide the gateway because it was also a site on the ARPANET. The CS Department vax computer (csvax) became the site "ucbvax" on the UUCP network. An internal network Berknet was set up to connect "ucbvax" on the UUCP network to "Berkeley" on the ARPANET. Horton explains that Professor Michael Stonebraker and Professor Domenico Ferrari, who were doing research to develop the Ingres data base, had a pair of machines (ing70) and (ingvax) which were sites on the ARPANET. They allowed Horton to use these machines for Usenet. Ing70 was the site known as "Berkeley" on the ARPANET. Horton and two other graduate students, Eric Allman and Eric Schmidt, set up the gateway between Usenet and the ARPANET and made it work. Schmidt created the local net, Berknet, to connect the ARPANET and the UUCPnet. The ARPANET and UUCP computers were tied together by Schmidt's Berknet. The path, Horton explains, went: "Any ARPA machine to Berkeley via ARPANET mail Ing70 (aka Berkeley) to csvax via Berknet ucbvax (aka csvax) to any UUCP machine via UUCP."(10) Human-Nets and WorldNet The Human-Nets mailing list [known on Usenet as the newsgroup FA.Human-nets] provided a mass of interesting posts to attract Usenet readership at a crucial period in Usenet's development. The mailing list Human-Nets, Truscott remembers, was a mailing list from the ARPANET for discussing the implications of world-wide ubiquitous networking. "This network of the future," he recalls, was referred to as WorldNet." It was a very interesting mailing list and possible only due to the ability of the network itself to permit those interested in this obscure topic to communicate."(11) A directory of the ARPANET mailing lists maintained at MIT during this period lists each of the mailing lists. Describing Human-Nets, it notes that this mailing list "has discussed many topics, all of them related in some way to the theme of a world- wide computer and communications network usually called WorldNet. The topics have ranged very widely from something like tutorials, to state of the art discussions, to rampant speculations about technology and its impact."(12) An article on Usenet about Human-Nets explained that "one reader expressed a wish for a `World Net' to tie all sorts of computers worldwide together."(13) Another article described how WorldNet "was a nice idea to dream about", but the writer was pessimistic that it could ever be implemented, at least within the next 10 years. He acknowledged, however, "Still, it's a fun idea to think about," and advised, "Maybe it should be tried on a smaller scale first (a distributed network of students with PCs at a university, perhaps a small city, or large community.) Who knows," the poster observed, "with a PC in almost every home in a few years, maybe it'll be possible and desirable."(14) One of the moderators of Human-Nets maintained how important it was to participate in such online discussion for those interested in developing ubiquitous world wide networking. Responding to a departing moderator's complaint that the discussion on the list had diverged to a variety of topics, the new moderator disagreed. He retorted: "Even if we have shifted away from discussing human networks, we are getting a first hand EXPERIENCE of what they are through this mailing list. No amount of `a priori' theorizing of their nature,' has as much explanatory power as personal experience. By observing what happens when connectivity is provided to a large mass of people in which they can FREELY voice their ideas, doubts, and opinions, a lot of insight is obtained into very important issues of mass intercommunication." "The fact," he continued, "that...dissimilar...topics have been discussed in our own instance of a human network says a lot about its nature and the interests and nature of its members and should not be considered as detracting from the quality of the discussion." "A human network," he concluded, "is a springboard for human interaction and thus for human action. Let's view it as such and keep repression and censorship at a minimum."(15) UUCPnet and the "Iron Curtain" of the ARPANET In contrast to the vision of ubiquitous human networking via computers discussed on the Human-Nets mailing list, the Usenet community faced a difficult battle when trying to communicate with those on the ARPANET. Posts on Usenet during the 1981 period reflect the constant efforts and frustration experienced by those on Usenet who wanted to contribute to the ARPANET mailing lists. Another popular ARPANET mailing list during this early period of Usenet was the Unix-wizards mailing list. It provided for discussion, the sharing of experiences, of problems, and of software, and for the debate over various issues that faced the Unix community. The mailing list was gatewayed from the ARPANET to Usenet and was available on Usenet as the newsgroup FA.unix- wizards. Recognizing the early difficulty that those on Usenet had in posting to the ARPANET mailing lists, one user asked: "You mean saying -n fa.unix.wizards doesn't get back to the arpanet? Does it just get to USENET? Or does it go anywhere?"(16) Another post reported the frustration experienced by those on Usenet who were trying to send messages to mailing lists carried on the ARPANET. The person wrote: "With regard to the ARPA/UUCP gateway problem, it appears that arpanet sites refuse to process mail from UUCP machines, while UUCP machines typically don't bother checking who stuff comes from before passing it on. In most cases this costs real money in terms of phone rates, use of spool space, etc...."(17) He proposed that UUCP sites retaliate so that transporting messages to Usenet from the ARPANET would be equally difficult: "We could have messages of the type: `Gateway to UUCPnet Closed...Service Unavailable'" He asked others on Usenet for "any ideas what kind of response would result if this was implemented?" Responding to this proposal, another Usenet user offered his objection: "I'd rather see messages of this form going back to ARPA: `Gateway to UUCPnet open...No Iron Curtain here'" "Or some such self-righteous garbage. Seriously, the interchange of information is too useful to get embroiled in hurt feelings. I get mad when Arpa blindly refuses stuff but would rather try to shame them (good luck!) than play the same game."(18) There were those on the ARPANET who sympathized with the problems experienced by the Usenet community in trying to contribute to the ARPANET mailing lists. Commenting on the frustration, a user at a U.S. government site that was both on the ARPANET and on Usenet wrote: "I am also concerned about USENET participants. We really need to be able to interact with them in a better way, yet UUCP gateways to the ArpaNet are VERBOTEN".(19) Often Usenet users would try to send messages to the ARPANET gateway only to get back notification that their message had bounced. Common messages notifying Usenet users that their efforts to send messages to the ARPANET mailing lists had failed included: "Sorry not an ARPANET gateway: Unable to deliver Mail" "unix-wizards@sri-unix... Mail has been disallowed between the Arpanet and Uucp net" "unix-wizards@sri-unix... Service unavailable" Other messages on Usenet during this period describe similar problems. For example, one user describes how he sent out 5 email messages to the mailing list FA.unix-wizards and each came back to him undelivered. He then tried to send the messages to the mailing list again, or in frustration gave up and posted them on Usenet in the newsgroup "net.general" so others could see the problems he was having. He reported: "It doesn't always work, folks! Last week I submitted 5 letters to ucbvax!unix-wizards; and got each one of them back the very next day, saying `service unavailable.' Depending on the message I either shipped it back right away, or just put it in net.general in disgust."(20) The ARPAnet <=> UUCPnet gateway The gateway set up to make it possible for uucp users of Usenet to contribute to the ARPANET mailing list Unix-wizards via uucp to "ucbvax", from "ucbvax" along Berknet to "Berkeley", the UCB site on the ARPANET, and from that site along the ARPANET via email to "sri-unix", a site on the ARPANET that would distribute the mailing list back to "Berkeley" or send it out on the ARPANET. The site `sri-unix' was a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, which was one of the earliest sites on the ARPANET. Describing how this gateway worked, a user from the University of California at Berkeley wrote: "Ucbvax is currently set up such that if you, as a UUCPnet (Usenet) user, send mail to `...ucbvax!unix-wizards', the message will be *automatically* forwarded to unix- wizards@sri-unix (via our internal network and then via the ARPAnet)."(21) He describes how `sri-unix' transported the message back to other sites: "The message is then redistributed by sri-unix to all sites on their `master' list, which include `csvax.post-unix- wizards@Berkeley'." In this way, the message was sent out on Usenet. "When we at Berkeley," he explained, "receive something addressed to this rather baroque-looking recipient, it is handed over to our network news program. From there, the message is redistributed via UUCPnet to the rest of the world." "ARPAnet access," he noted, "is not available (at least through Berkeley) for `private communications', which would include someone on the UUCPnet attempting to respond to an INDIVIDUAL who submitted something via the ARPAnet, or vice versa." A user at the Ballistics Research Labs (BRL) noted the burden the gateway imposed on both the University of California at Berkeley and SRI and offered to help if necessary. He wrote: BRL has a strong commitment to UNIX, and we encourage discussions about UNIX. If SRI gets overwhelmed by the burden of distributing the list, or if we `clone' several lists, we will be glad to take the task of mailing the stuff.'(22) By September 1981, a post indicated that the ucb<=>sri-unix gateway for the Unix-wizards mailing list was being changed. "This is the last message you'll be receiving on Unix-wizards through SRI-UNIX," the writer reported. "Now the list will be mailed out of SRI-WARF(host 1/73);" he noted(23). Posts could still be sent to `sri-unix', but they would then be forwarded for transporting to `sri.warf'. Numerous other users commented on the precariousness of this UUCPnet - ARPANET gateway used by the Usenet (uucp) community during this period. For example, Dave Farber, at the University of Delaware, warned, "As to relaying to the ARPAnet, communications could be stopped easily by some agency stating to the sites doing the relaying under the table - to stop it." Farber was part of the effort to have the National Science Foundation set up a network which was called CSNET as a way to extend access to the ARPANET to NSF supported academic and industrial researchers . He expressed his hope that CSNET would become a force to change the frustrating situation.(24) Usenet users had to use some kind of gateway to post to any ARPANET mailing list. "Certain newsgroups (fa.all)," a user on Usenet explained, "are not supposed to be posted to by people. Rather, you are supposed to mail to ucbvax! to get it to the arpanet people too...Another reason was the gateway restriction-- direct replies didn't work!"(25) ARPANET users also encountered difficulties with communication using the ARPANET. Describing the problem MIT experienced as a result of its efforts to support the ARPANET mailing lists, a user at MIT wrote: "There is always a threat of official or public accusations of misuse of the networks for certain mailing lists. This actually happened with a list called WINE-LOVERS and Datamation [a technical journal]...The fiasco, nearly resulted in MIT being removed from the network, and cost us several months of research time while we fought legal battles to show why our machines should not be removed from the ARPAnet. We are all in the hands of our neighbors. The best thing to do is to ensure that we are all educated as to how to take care of each other and ourselves."(26) Usenet as a Public Computer Users Network While the ARPANET was subject to the regulations and policies set by the U.S. Defense Communications Agency (DCA), during this period Usenet was considered a public computer users network. Policies were proposed, and then were subject to discussion by the Usenet community. For example, in October, 1981, Horton proposed the following statement of policy for Usenet: USENET is a public access network. Any User is allowed to post to any newsgroup (unless abuses start to be a problem). All users are to be given access to all newsgroups except that private newsgroups can be created which are protected. In particular, all users must have access to the net and fa newsgroups, and to local public newsgroups such as general [net.general]. He continued: "The USENET map is also public at all times, and so any site which is on USENET is expected to make public the fact that they are on USENET, their USENET connections (e.g. their sys file), and the name, address, phone number and electronic address of the contact for that site for the USENET directory.(27) In another post, the writer describing the wide range of topic areas on Usenet, explained: "The net represents a wide spectrum of interest (everything from the latest kill-the-millions-hardware to the latest sci-fi movies)." He also noted the broad range of sites on Usenet, "The participants of the net, include major (and not so major) universities, corporations, think tanks, research centers, and the like." "All these people seem to have one thing in common -- the willingness to discuss any idea, whether it is related to war, peace, politics, science, technology, philosophy (ethics!), science fiction, literature, etc. While there is a lot of flame," he commented, "the discussion usually consists of well thought out replys to meaningful questions." (He gave the example of "Should the Postal Service be allowed to control electronic mail?....") And he added, "I am told that a lot of traffic on the net is not discussion, but real honest-to-goodness work. (Code, applications, ideas, and such.)"(28) Those posting to Usenet included Unix users, ARPANET users, Usenet users working at Bell Labs, at other industrial sites, at University sites, at government sites, etc. For example, both Thompson and Ritchie, creators of Unix, sometimes responded to Usenet discussions. Thompson contributed to the NET.chess discussions and Ritchie contributed occasionally to fa.unix- wizards, among other newsgroups. Following is a description of Usenet posted in March 1982. "USENET is an international network of UNIX sites with hookups into the ARPA network, too. It is basically a fancy electronic Bulletin Board System. Numerous BTL [Bell Telephone Labs] machines are connected at HO, IH, MH, with a few elsewhere, too. In addition, there are major sites at universities: U C Berkeley, Duke, U Waterloo, and so on (...) And at industry nationwide: DEC, Tektronics, Microsoft, Intel, etc. There are numerous bulletin board categories, set up in a hierarchy."(29) The article describes how the "fa" newsgroups on Usenet "can reach a very large user community, including USENET, sites on UUCP, Berknet, BLN, and the ARPANET, as well as sites on the ARPANET which are not on Usenet who get the news via direct electronic mailing." It explains that "Net.all newsgroups are available to all people on the entire network who read netnews."Though not all sites got every newsgroup, "Usenet is defined as all sites that net.all reaches." Characterizing Usenet as a logical network, as opposed to a physical network, Horton explains that Usenet is a network of sites running netnews software: "For those of you who don't know, USENET is a logical network of sites running netnews. Netnews is a network oriented bulletin board, making it very easy to broadcast a query to a large base of people. USENET currently has about 50 sites and is growing rapidly."(30) Horton emphasizes that Usenet is a users' network. He explains: "USENET exists for and by the users, and should respond to the needs of those users."(31) He also notes that "USENET is a cashless network." This meant that "No person or organization may charge another organization for news, except that by prearrangement." He explains that a site could charge only for the extra expenses incurred in sending Usenet to another site. And almost every site that received news had to be willing to forward it to at least two additional sites. Horton's policy proposal suggested that articles should be of high quality, signed, and that offensive articles shouldn't be posted. "Peer pressure via direct electronic mail will, hopefully, prevent any further distasteful or offensive articles. Repeated violations," he noted, "can be grounds for removing a user or site from the network." Common to many of the posts in these early years, is the encouragement that users participate and voice their concerns and opinions, both in the ongoing discussion in various newsgroups, as well as in determining the practices and policies guiding how Usenet functions. For example, Adam Buchsbaum, a high school student who played an important role in Usenet, started the NET.columbia newsgroups, a newsgroup about space issues. He posted the opening message inviting participation: "Greetings fellow space enthusiasts! This newsgroup was designed to inform people on developments in our space program. Although named `columbia,' it will contain articles about the entire space program, including the shuttle for which it is named. Please feel free to reply, comment, criticize, and submit your articles. Also, I hope this will serve as an open ground for discussion about events in the space program. Comments, etc. can be mailed to myself (research!sjb) or submitted directly into the newsgroup. In all, I hope that this will provide an atmosphere for people who are interested in the space program to discuss it and be informed of new events."(32) Such articles on Usenet, welcoming contributions from all participants, helped to set a firm foundation for interesting and lively discussion on early Usenet newsgroups. Changing to B News The continuing expansion and popularity of Usenet was creating the need for changes in the software. Describing some of the problems that the ever larger number of posts was creating for those using netnews, Horton explains that A News recorded subscriptions as a one line pattern, and a timestamp recorded which messages were read so that you were expected to read all new Netnews at once. He writes: "In the Spring of 1981, Usenet had grown to the point where it was awkward to use A News. It was important to read news in newsgroup order (not by time of arrival) and to quit in the middle leaving some news unread. Also, the user interface of A news resembled V7 /bin/mail, and users were expressing a preference for other e-mail styles (Mail, MH, etc) and for the Berkeley msgs program."(33) At the time, Horton was finishing up his dissertation so he didn't have the time to do the needed work. Fortunately, however, as Horton recounts, "One day, into my office walked Matt Glickman. He was a local high school student on spring break, looking for a computer project. We teamed up to design B news, and he did most of the coding that week. (The actual production release of B news was announced by Matt at the Winter 1982 Usenix.) I'll never forget the smile on Matt's face when he told me, "You know, you've made my spring break!" Horton explains, "B News was patterned after the Rand MH e-mail program, and designed to be compatible enough that MH could be used to read the news. It put each newsgroup in a separate directory (causing a 14 byte limit on newsgroup names that lasted until years later when subgroups made subdirectories) and used a `.newsrc' file to record newsgroup subscriptions and which messages were read. Horton notes, "It defaulted to a msgs- style user interface and provided a read-it-all-now escape to a mail program like Mail. In those days it was also reasonable to dump it all to a printer and read it like a newspaper." In a post announcing B News, Glickman described the features of the new version of Netnews software that was being written: "I'm working on a new netnews. It is not ready. It is taking a lot longer that it should. I hope to have a rough version running locally this week. Initially, the major new features will be: 1) No more .bitfile, .uindex, or .nindex. Everyone has a .newsrc file in their home directory which contains a list of the articles they've already read. This will allow skipping articles and coming back to them later: random- access. The same interfaces are around: /bin/mail, msgs, and print. The -c option still works in the same way, but I'm beginning work on an improved interface with the Berkeley Mail program so that netnews will know which articles were looked at during Mail." Among the features Glickman describes are a new article format, an expire feature so articles could be read out of order, but would be cancelled at a determined date, and the netnews command was to be split into two commands, inews, to insert news, and readnews to read news. He also describes how B News provided directories for each newsgroup in a spool directory and all the articles had sequentially numbered filenames in their directories. "I'll try to keep you posted on late-breaking developments," Glickman promised.(34) Automating AT&T and Usenet In the summer of 1981, Horton received his graduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and went to work in Columbus, Ohio at a Bell Labs facility there. During this period AT&T was automating much of its operations and it recognized that helping to develop and participate in Usenet, and the UUCPnet that was being developed along with Usenet, could help AT&T solve some of the problems raised by its pioneering efforts developing large scale software systems. Bob Rosin in a post on Usenet, described the difficulties that those working on large-scale software projects encountered and the important technological problem this represented: "There is no cheap, easy way to accumulate the years of experience necessary to deal with complex software based systems. One need only examine the ugly reinventions of assembly language generated by ignorant non-converts and to watch thousands of neophytes wallow in the pits of personal computer assemblers to realize that, while software is in its infancy, people who have studied and built software are way ahead of the great unwashed."(35) Recognizing difficulties inherent in large scale software projects, there were those at Bell Labs who labored to encourage management to improve the software development environment. This included adopting and spreading Usenet and email among programmers. One such article posted on Usenet described these efforts: "There is a lot of effort going on now to try to convince management in Bell Labs to improve the software work environment. Good electronic mail and bulletin boards are an important part of that environment. There is a lot of interest in netnews here, with lots of people from management and even the legal department looking at it."(36) During this period, Bell Labs was doing work to develop and implement the 5 ESS switch. Describing how the 5 ESS was an all purpose switch that would replace the other switches that had been developed for particular purposes. John Hobson wrote in Human-Nets: "Yes, there is such a thing as a #5 ESS. This is a bigger and better ESS, designed to be a replacement for all others. That is, there is one basic configuration, and different versions depending on the capacity needed. This is an improvement over the #1/1A, #2, #3 and #4 ESSes, which are fundamentally different machines, each designed to cover one range of live trunk numbers. (#1/1A is used in large, metropolitan switching offices, #4 in small, rural ones.) The #5 ESS is expected to be out in the field sometime next year."(37) The 5 ESS project was a large scale programming project involving many programmers and over a million lines of computer code. Describing the 5 ESS project in a post that appeared on Usenet, the writer explains: "Our project (#5 ESS) uses a lot of remote command execution to support our multi-machine development scenario (13 11/70's + 2 VAXes + 1 IBM 3033 - AP). This environment is treated as though it is what it isn't, a single machine. That is we have developers spread across 7 - 9 PDP-11's + a 370 and they all work on the same project [We produce `load modules' for 3 processor types...that way.]"(38) Several articles on Usenet describe how difficult it often was for system adminstrators to convince their management that it was worthwhile to support Usenet at a work site. For example, describing the situation at Bell Labs, one poster wrote: "Much of the netnews distribution within bell labs is done without any explicit approval. I would be surprised to learn that many of other of the corporate participants in Usenet had explicit approval from management. This makes us all very vulnerable."(39) Another poster from `cincy', a site at the University of Cincinnati, in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, verified that this was the situation elsewhere. He wrote: "When I was at cincy, we had a HARD fight to get the administration to pay the bill."(40) Because of the difficulties that those at commercial sites had maintaining their participation in Usenet, a debate developed between those who felt that Usenet should be uncensored and those who felt that an uncensored Usenet might lead their management to cut off access to Usenet. One poster from "tektronix" explained the dilemna: "I am beginning to wonder about USENET. I thought it was supposed to represent electronic mail and bulletins among a group of professionals with a common interest, thus representing fast communications about important technical topics. Instead it appears to be mutating into electronic graffiti. If the system did not cost anything, that would be fine, but for us here at Tektronix, at least, it is costing us better than $200 a month for 300-baud long distance to copy lists of people's favorite movies, and recipes for goulash, and arguments about metaphysics and so on. Is this really appropriate to this type of system?"(41) There were also those at University and government sites who were fearful that certain types of posts might jeopardize grants their sites received. Others maintained that Usenet should be uncensored, but that sites could decide what newsgroups they would carry or what posts they might read. For example, one Usenet user wrote: "What I would really like is to work out methods that would allow as free a flow of information as possible. Some of the problem with the lack of control we have now (i.e. either too many newsgroups/lists or too many messages on one list) may be solvable by implementing new tools and conventions without resorting to brute force. I believe that there are limits to how much the group of users on one machine can store and comprehend, and that we ought to try to have this be what moderates groups (along with a certain amount of peer-pressure to keep the quality up). Something more along the lines of democracy or physical law than dictatorship, anarchy or even socialism."(42) Some sites felt that the content of Usenet should be restricted to topics that management or funding agencies would approve of. Others argued that a site could choose which newsgroups to carry, but that shouldn't limit the broad range of newsgroups that would be available. In summarizing a discussion on this issue that took place at Usenix, Horton noted that newsgroups that seem trivial to one site might be important to another and he reported that those discussing the problem at the Usenix meeting felt that sites could determine what they would carry, but shouldn't impose their tastes on all of Usenet. A similar debate occurred on the Unix-wizards mailing list. A post reports that some Unix-wizards had dropped off the mailing list complaining about the trivia on the list. Others responded that they didn't want anyone deciding what they could read or not read, so they wanted the list to remain uncensored. Cross Atlantic Link Not only were links within North America difficult to establish, but Dik Winter, from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, describes how the first cross Atlantic Usenet link was delayed until 1982/83 because of the difficulty of acquiring an auto dialer modem that conformed to European standards. "In Europe," he writes, the two people responsible for the link were Teus Hagen and Piet Beertema," both at the Mathematisch Centrum, a research site in Amsterdam (now called CWI). The Mail link was between decvax <-> mcvax . It connected the site `decvax' at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the U.S. with `mcvax' in the Netherlands. Beertema recounts how the early transport of News into Amsterdam was from "philabs" a site at the North American research laboratory for the Dutch company Phillips. Hagen writes that European Unix users who met in European DEC meetings began to do networking in the late 1970's. He describes how relationships were established between Peter Collinson from the University of Kent in England, Simon Kenyon of the Imperial College in Dublin, Ireland, Yves Devilles from INDRIA in Paris, France, Keld Simonsen from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Johan Helsingius of the University of Helsinki in Finland, Daniel Karrenberg of the University of Dortmund in Germany and others from other university and technical sites like the Technical University in Vienna, Austria, the University of Stockholm in Sweden and Siemens and Olivetti, and his site at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Eventually email via UUCP was established with support from Armando Stettner at DEC laboratories. Hagen describes how those involved wanted also to have "a regular exchange of news articles (USENET) as well." Usenet in Europe, he explains, "was born from a tape I took with me from [the] San Francisco USENIX conference...back to Amsterdam." At a USENIX conference in San Francisco, Hagen met Dan Lorenzeni from Philabs. Since Lorenzeni worked with Phillips, whose Mother firm was from Holland, and Hagen was from Holland, an agreement was made to have Lorenzeni send Hagen tapes of news articles. Hagen describes how a 1200 baud UUCP intercontinental link was set up between "philabs" in the U.S. and "mc" in Holland. He explains that they couldn't use any 2400 baud modems as that "equipment was unreliable, expensive, and modems from different manufacturers could not talk to each other." On one occasion, Hagen remembers he came into the office "rather early (9:30 am) and noticed that the 1200 baud modem [was] still running. UUCP US and UUCP Holland were sending each other resync messages." It was running from 7 pm the previous night to the [next] morning. "Within 5 minutes," Hagen remembers, he was in the Director's Office "trying to explain the high phone bill" which they had run up using "equipment which was not even allowed" as the law in Holland didn't allow use of a 1200 baud modem. "After that," Hagen continues, "we made an arrangement with Dan to share more of the costs."(43) Lorenzeni, who helped to set up the news link between "philabs" and "mc" concurs. He describes how he worked with Hagen and Beertema to set up the link. "From the beginning," he writes, "they only wanted certain newsgroups. So they supplied me with the list." Lorenzeni notes, "From the start, I thought USENET was a great thing and promoted it as much as possible. Over time the S/N [sound/noise] ratio got worse and worse, but it was always fun."(44) Hagen describes some of the frustration that European participants in Usenet experienced. He writes, "I can remember a fight in net.general when someone in the U.S...complained about posts from Europe. The person," Hagen recounts, said "we were dummies as we introduced errors in the date/time stamp" on the posts from Europe. "He was complaining," Hagen explains, about "the fact that he was reading news articles which were replies" to posts though they were dated "a day earlier [than] the original post." He forgot, Hagen explains, that the U.S. was in a different time zone. Hagen explains how there were several other problems faced by the European netnews community, such as high phone costs, leading them to work out a way all would share in the costs. This led to a well organized network of "backbones" connecting UNIX user groups in different countries. Also, language differences were a problem to be dealt with. One of the results, Hagen remembers, was in a message to all news readers noting that international meant "not everyone is speaking their own national language." Hagen also describes how he presented the potential of a European net at a conference of EUUG (European Unix User Groups) in Paris with a presentation where he showed e-mail and news and made available some illegal modems which were spread throughout Europe. In the following post from 1983, Jim McKie at Mathematisch Centrum, describes the some of the difficulties confronting these early European Usenet users. He writes: "Well, the net isn't collapsing over here, and is already run on a pay-as-you-read basis. I can't speak for the UK, and I am sure, as in all things, the UK would not like somewhere else in Europe to speak for her (the UK is only GEOGRAPHICALLY close to Europe), but the UK gets it's news free from vax135; I don't know how much they get. And we get a small number of groups through philabs, ones which people asked us to get, not a blanket coverage anymore. Hopefully we will soon be getting some more news groups from decvax, and to those sites which ask for them, we will redistribute. Another major manufacturer has offered some free satellite time, which we are investigating....We are in the fortunate position of starting up late and having someone (Teus Hagen) who put things on a nice footing....But it means we have to keep trying to find cheaper ways to obtain the groups, so we can afford to make some mistakes and chuck them later. However, the real problem is that the (soon to be) 3 news feeds supply different groups, and there is no net.anything passed between the UK and Europe, so we would perhaps not get a fair and unbiased choice...."(45) Several of the European Usenet pioneers report that DEC soon became involved in helping to get Usenet to Europe. Winter also describes the difficulties that those working to provide a Usenet link to Australia faced, having to transport Usenet via computer tape via airplane in the earliest days to provide Australia - North American connectivity. Setting a Foundation for the Future Many of the academic, industrial and government sites participating in the early days of Usenet were involved with computer software or hardware research. The developing network of Usenet sites helped to provide the Unix community with the technical and social support they needed to keep computers functioning and to deal with the perennial upgrades as computer development advanced. Often people online would ask for advice or offer information or programs to others so that people could build on each other's experiences, rather than "reinventing the wheel." In additional to such technical cooperation, newsgroups were developed to discuss a wide range of topics, including world-wide ubiquitous networking in the future (Human-Nets), science fiction (sci-fi lovers), computer games (NET.games), etc. Socializing was encouraged in NET.singles (or NET.social), recipes were exchanged in NET.food. Music was discussed and recommended in NET.music. The developments and problems of the space program were discussed in NET.columbia (on Usenet) and NET.space (on the ARPANET mailing list).(46) As the interests of people were reflected in their suggestions for new newsgroups, online discussions developed over how to create a process that would make the desired groups possible. The early development of a newsgroup creation process and the discussion over how to structure that process help to demonstrate that a great deal of effort by many people was expended to create a functional and democratic procedures for the early Usenet. The earliest newsgroups were all unmoderated. Everyone had the right to participate and contribute their views. A rich and interesting content emerged that surprised even the participants themselves. The development and spread of computers require new means of communication like Usenet. A great deal of effort and discussion went into creating Usenet. This has provided Usenet with the strong foundation needed to support the technical and educational needs that result from the increasing use of computers in our times. Usenet has grown and flourished and in turn serves the needs of those using and developing computer technology. The Unix community gave the world high tech software tools that could perform wondrous feats with simple programs.(47) The Usenet community took these tools and used them to open up and create channels for communication so that those in the online Unix community could help each other wield the tools. In a society that hopes to progress in this era of rapidly developing computer hardware and growing demands for computer software, more and more of the population needs to have access both to the tools and to the means of communication needed to wield these tools. This is the foundation of the cooperative and democratic culture that Usenet has pioneered and made possible. It is important to understand and build on these roots and to nourish and expand this cooperative culture. It is important to make this cooperative networking culture, this marriage of an ever larger network of computers and people, available to ever broader sectors of the population if the promise of computer technology to provide a better and more productive world, is to be realized. We are much closer to the dream of a WorldNet today, than we were in 1979, thanks to the hard work of the Usenet pioneers in setting a firm foundation. We will need to build on the foundation they set, if we hope to make the dream of a WorldNet, of ubiquitous computer networking, a reality. ------------------------- Notes (1) The following account is from email correspondence from Tom Truscott, which has been compiled into an unpublished interview "Interview with Tom Truscott: On the Environment and Early Days of Usenet News." (2) The paper was by Claude E. Shannon, "A Chess-Playing Machine", Scientific American, February 1950, p. 48. (3)The next oldest paper Truscott found was by Alex Bernstein and M. de V. Roberts, "Computer versus Chess-Player," Scientific American, June 1958. (4) This was the July, 1974 paper by Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, "The Unix Time-Sharing System", published in Communications of the ACM, Vol 17 no 7, pp. 365-375. A reference to chess is on p. 375. (5) Usenet Archives, Steve Bellovin, Wed Oct 10 19:48 PDT 1990: Available via ftp: weber.ucsd.edu . (6) Email correspondence from Tom Truscott. (7) Email correspondence with Mark Horton, August 1995. Horton like Truscott, was introduced to programming using BASIC. He writes, "It was about all a High School student had access to in 1970. First on the GE system, but that was expensive. First Portland and then San Dieguito HS's got access to HP 2000 BASIC systems with unlimited usage." In describing what he felt is some of the importance of BASIC, Horton writes, " I don't know if BASIC itself is that key in the development of TS systems, but it may be another example of one thing that drove UNIX: having your own computer with unlimited cycles is far better than buying expensive cycles on some other machine you can't control. I think that's what's made PCs so popular, too." (8) Mark Horton, Mon Oct 15 19:49 PDT 1990, Usenet History Archives Available via ftp: weber.ucsd.edu . (9) Mark Horton, Tue Nov 24 04:51 PST 1992, Usenet History Archives. (10) Email communication from Mark Horton. (11) Email communication from Truscott. (12) Rich Zellich, 16 Feb. 1982, posted on Usenet in post by btempleton, watmath.2114, Subject: Arpanet mailing list directory. (13) 17 Oct 1982, Zaleski at Ru-Gren, Subject: Why not AT&T for World Net by Michael Zaleski. (14) 19 Oct 1982, Greg Skinner, , Subject: Worldnet responses. (15) 03 June 1981, Jorge Phillips, Subject: administrivia. (16) cincy.151, fa.unix-wizards, cincy!chris, Tue Apr 7 13:16:12 1981, Subject: to unix-wizards. (17) A. Feather, pur-ee.123, net.general, pur-ee!aef, Mon Aug 24 15:13:14 1981, Subject: UUCP gateway. (18) esquire.127, net.general, Wed Aug 26 09:48:51, UUCP gateway, Re: A Feather's suggestion. (19) ucbvax.2946, fa.unix-wizards, Re: PROPER FORUM, mike@bmd70@BRL, Fri Sep 4 14:55:10 1981. (20) ucbvax.2858, Sat Aug 29 10:17:34 1981, purdue!cak. (21) Geoff Peck, ucbvax.2842, fa.unix-wizards, ARPAnet access. (22) ucbvax.2946, fa.unix-wizards, Re: PROPER FORUM, mike@bmd70@BRL, Fri Sep 4 14:55:10 1981. (23) FA.unix-wizards, ucbvax.3198. (24) ucbvax.2955, Sat Sep 5 07:34:34 1981, from farber@udel. See description of CSNET in Appendix IV. (25) Net.news, cbosgd.113, Sat Oct 3 19:51:41 1981, Re news. (26) ucbvax.5782, fa.digest-p, Thu Jan 14 05:46:13 1982, From cStacey@MIT.AI. (27) NET.news, cbosgd.120, Tue Oct 13 20:56:30 1981, cbosgd!mark, Subject: Whether the sys and uuname files are public. (28) NET.news, wolfvax.53, net.news, wolfvax!jcz, Mon Nov 2 21:47:32 1981, Net Names, In Real Life: Carl Zeigler, Location NCSU, Raleigh. (29) ucbarpa.1182, net.sources, Subject: ARPAVAX: Usenet, Tue, Apr 20, 1950:48 1982, misc/newsinfo, from eiss!ladm, Fri Mar 19 16:20:27. (30) Mark Horton, fa.unix-wizards, ucbvax.4080, Sun Sep 27 22:04:41 1981, Usenet membership. (31) NET.news, cbosgd.794, Wed Dec 23 21:28:32 1981, Subject: Proposed Usenet policies. (32) net.columbia, research!sjb, Thu Sep 17 07:28:50 1981, Adam Buchsbaum kept the official list of newsgroups and published it regularly to the net for several years in the mid 1980s. (33) From email correspondence from Mark Horton, Mon Jul 24 15:26:45 1995. Mark explains that A news recorded subscriptions as a one-line pattern, and a timestamp recorded which messages were read - you were expected to read all new Netnews at once. (34) Aucbonyx.118 NET.news utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!Onyx:glickman Fri May 16 10:29:40 1980 New Netnews. (35) Bob Rosin, Bell Labs, Linroft, N.J., houxf.148, NET.general, houxf!rosin, Fri May 7 09:26:53 1982, Re: debugging microcode in writable control store. (36) NET.news, ihnss.995, net.news, ihnss!warren, Subject: Misconceptions about Bell Labs Netnews Content. (37) Human-Nets Digest, 28 May 1981. (38) NET.blfp, alanr, Subject: Remote Command Execution, File Installation, Tues Jul 21 10:42:15. (39) ihnss!warren, ihnss.995, Subj: Misconceptions about Bell Labs, Netnews Content. (40) pursue.139, net.general, net.news, cak, Sat Dec 17 19:27:08 1981, Subj: Freedom of the dataways. (41) NET.misc, dadlaA.98, net.misc, dadlaA!steve, Mon Mar 15 21:56:49 1982, Subject: Trivia on the Net. (42) Asri-unix.429, net.news utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!knutsen Tue Jan 5 17:46:42 1982, USENET policy reposted from Date: 15 Dec 1981 at 1522-PST From: Andrew Knutsen Subject: Re: read-only newsgroups (net.news cbosg.193) (43) Email correspondence from Teus Hagen, August 1995. (44) Email correspondence from Dan Lorenzeni, August 1995. (45) Dec. 15 1981 at 1522, Andrew Knutsen . (46) Wed, 3-Aug-83 01:12:41 EDT Jim McKie Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam ...{decvax|philabs}!mcvax!jim (mcvax.5322) net.news : Re: cost of sending netnews to aliens. (47) A listing of all the newsgroups available by March, 1982 is in the appendix. (48) See for example the thunderclap in the Appendix III. ------------------------------- Appendices are available. See url in below. Thank yous to Tom Truscott, Mark Horton, Rob Scott, Dik Winter, Russell Lowell and others on Usenet for their comments on an earlier draft and their helpful suggestions. In addition, thank yous to Teus Hagen and Dan Lorenzeni for their helpful info about setting up the Cross-Atlantic link. Also, thanks to Henry Spencer and others at the University of Toronto for archiving early Usenet posts so folks today can have some of the joy we hear about from the pioneers of being able to read every Usenet post back then. And thanks to Bruce Jones for his work setting up the Usenet history online archives at weber.ucsd.edu and for making material available online. --- Ronda Hauben rh120@columbia.edu Working on an updating of The Netizens Book - Drafts for Comment are available at http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/project_book.html The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net An Anthology on the History and Impact of the Net http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/project_book.html