He Made The Net Work

A half-dozen individuals have been hailed as father of the Internet. Scores
of others also had a hand in birthing this network. But the person who sifted
through the contending technologies and drew up the blueprint for a networking
infrastructure-then actually made it work-was Lawrence G. Roberts.

Roberts' baby was ARPAnet, the Internet's predecessor. But he never laid
claim to the original idea. The Net's inspirational father was J.C.R.
Licklider (1915-90), a psychologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
outlined his dream of a Galactic Network in the early 1960s. Then, during a
stint at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA (now DARPA),
"Lick" pretty much described today's Net.

At a fateful meeting with Lick in 1964, Roberts became a disciple. Still,
when ARPA attempted to recruit him to oversee the network project, Roberts held
back, worried that the administrative duties would be boring. Finally, in
December, 1966, at age 29, he acquiesced. The next year, Roberts outlined his
networking scheme at conferences and meetings with researchers. Scientists often
resisted his call to share their computers, which were rare and expensive
resources back then. But ARPA held the purse strings for much of their funding,
so Roberts was hard to resist.

ARPAnet's key building blocks came from such researchers as Leonard
Kleinrock and Paul Baran in the US and Donald W. Davies in Britain. Each devised
an approach to "packet switching," which solves bandwidth constraints
by slicing transmissions into small packets and shooting them over the same
wires. To develop a network-control protocol that would impose some order on
packet switching's intentional chaos, Roberts relied on Vinton G. Cerf and
Robert E. Kahn. In the late 1970s they refined this into TCP/IP, or
Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the technology still in use
today.

The call to build ARPAnet's first hardware went out in 1968. It triggered a
flood of proposals that stacked up

almost seven feet high and taxed even Roberts' speed-reading skills-2,400
words per minute. Roberts selected Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) to build the
first network switches. The initial units went to Kleinrock at the University of
California at Los Angeles and Douglas C. Engelbart at Stanford Research
Institute in 1969. BBN got the first East Coast "node" in 1970. After
BBN's Ray Tomlinson wrote an e-mail program in 1971, scientists began flocking
to the Net. Roberts left ARPA in 1973 to found Telenet Communications Corp. as a
BBN subsidiary (now part of Sprint Corp. (FON)). It was the first commercial
packet-switched network. Today, Roberts continues to dream of bigger, better,
faster networks. In 1999 he founded Caspian Networks to develop switches for
multimedia traffic such as movies and radio broadcasts. Movies weren't even a
glint in Roberts' eye in 1967, but he emerged as the star of the Internet
drama. 

By Otis Port in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2004 by The
McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc