Internet history: expanding interactivity

In the early 1960s, interactive computers, starting their way from the tender buds, fostered in the Lincoln laboratory and MIT, gradually began to spread everywhere, and in two different senses. First, the computers themselves pulled out their mustaches that reached neighboring buildings, campuses and cities, which allowed users to interact with them at a distance, with several users simultaneously. These new time-sharing systems have flourished, eventually becoming platforms for the first virtual, online communities. Secondly, the seeds of interactivity spread across all states, and rooted in California. And for this first seedling, there was one person, a psychologist named Joseph Karl Robnett Liclayder .

Joseph Apple Seed *

* An allusion to the American folklore character known as Johnny Appleseed , or “Johnny Apple Bean”, famous for its active apple tree planting in the Midwest (apple seed) / approx. trans.

Joseph Carl Robnett Liclider — for Lick's friends — specialized in psychoacoustics , an area that linked imaginary states of consciousness, psychology and sound physics measured by instruments. We casually mentioned him earlier - he was a consultant at a hearing at the FCC about Hush-a-Phone in the 1950s. He honed his skills at the Harvard psychoacoustic laboratory during the war, developing technologies that improve the audibility of radio programs in noisy bombers.
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Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, aka Lick

Like many American scientists of his generation, he discovered ways to combine his interests with military needs after the war, but not because he was very interested in weapons or national defense. There were only two major civilian sources of research funding - these were private institutions founded by industrial giants at the turn of the century: the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute. The National Institutes of Health had only a few million dollars, and the National Science Foundation was founded only in 1950, and had the same modest budget. In the 1950s, in order to obtain funding for interesting scientific and technical projects, it was best to rely on the Ministry of Defense.

Therefore, in the 1950s, Lick entered the MIT acoustic laboratory, which was run by physicists Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, and received almost all the funding from the US Navy. After that, his experience of connecting human senses with electronic equipment made him the first candidate for a new MIT air defense project. Participating in the " Charles Project " development team involved in the implementation of the Valli Committee's air defense report, Lick insisted on including human factors in the project, and as a result he was appointed one of the directors of the development of radar displays at the Lincoln laboratory.

There, at some point in the mid-1950s, he intersected with Weight Clark and TX-2, and immediately became infected with computer interactivity. He was fascinated by the idea of ​​complete control over a powerful machine, capable of instantly solving any task assigned to it. He began to develop the idea of ​​creating a “symbiosis of man and machine,” a partnership between man and a computer, capable of enhancing the intellectual power of man just as industrial machines enhance his physical abilities (it is worth noting that Leek considered this stage intermediate, and that later computers would learn to think independently). He noticed that 85% of his working time

... was mainly devoted to clerical or mechanical actions: searching, computing, constructing drawings, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing for a decision. Moreover, my choices of what is worth and what not to try were determined in shamefully large degree by the arguments of clerical ability, not intellectual ability. Operations that take up most of the time, ostensibly devoted to technical considerations, could be performed by better machines.

The overall concept did not go far from the " Memex " described by Vanivar Bush - an intelligent amplifier, which he sketched in 1945 in his book How We Can Think, although instead of a mixture of electromechanical and electronic components like Bush, we came to purely electronic digital computers. Such a computer would use its incredible speed to help in clerical work related to any scientific or technical project. People would be able to get rid of this monotonous work and spend all their attention on the formation of hypotheses, building models and assigning goals to a computer. Such a partnership would give incredible advantages to both researchers and national defense, and would help American scientists to overtake Soviet ones.


Vanivar Bush's Memex, an early concept for automatic information extraction, complementing intelligence

Shortly after this landmark meeting, Lick brought his passion for interactive computers with him to a new job in a consulting firm run by his old colleagues, Bolt and Beranek. For years, they worked up advising in parallel with academic work in the field of physics; for example, they studied the acoustics of a cinema in Hoboken (New Jersey). The task of analyzing the acoustics of the new UN building in New York provided them with a large flow of orders, so they decided to leave MIT and consult all their time. They were soon joined by a third partner, architect Robert Newman, and they called themselves “Bolt, Beranek and Newman” (BBN). By 1957, they had grown to a medium-sized firm with dozens of employees, and Beranek decided that they ran the risk of saturating the acoustic research market. He wanted to expand the competence of the company beyond sound, covering the whole spectrum of human interaction and artificial environment, from concert halls to cars, and through all the senses.

And he, of course, sought out his old colleague Liklayder, and hired him on the generous conditions of the new vice-president for psychoacoustics. However, Beranek did not take into account Lika's wild enthusiasm for interactive computing. Instead of an expert in psychoacoustics, he received not exactly a computer expert, but a computer preacher, who was eager to open his eyes to others. During the year, he convinced Beranek to lay out tens of thousands of dollars to buy a computer, a small, weak LGP-30 device made by the contractor of the Defense Ministry Librascope. Having no experience in engineering, he brought another SAGE veteran, Edward Fredkin, to help set up this machine. Despite the fact that Lika was mainly distracted by the computer from his main job, while he was trying to learn programming, after a year and a half he convinced partners to spend more money ($ 150,000, which is about $ 1.25 million for current money) to buy more powerful computer: the newest PDP-1 production DEC. Lick convinced BBN that digital computers have a future, and that someday someday their investment in experience in this area will pay off.

Shortly thereafter, Lick almost accidentally found himself in a position ideally suited to spread an interactive culture throughout the country, becoming the head of a new government computing department.

ARPA

During the Cold War, every action had its opposition. As the first Soviet atomic bomb led to the creation of SAGE, the first artificial Earth satellite launched by the USSR in October 1957 gave rise to a whole flurry of reactions in the US government. The situation was aggravated by the fact that although the USSR was four years behind the United States on the issue of a nuclear bomb, it took a leap forward in rocket science, overtaking the Americans in an orbit race (it turned out that it was about four months).

One of the responses to the emergence of Sputnik-1 in 1958 was the creation of the Office of Advanced Research Projects of the US Department of Defense (ARPA). In contrast to the modest amounts allocated to the needs of civil science, ARPA received a budget of $ 520 million, three times the funding of the National Science Foundation, which itself was tripled in response to the appearance of Sputnik-1.

Despite the fact that the Office could work on a wide range of any advanced projects that the Minister of Defense considered expedient, initially it was intended to focus all attention on rocket production and space - such was the decisive response to Sputnik-1. ARPA reported directly to the Minister of Defense, and therefore was able to rise above the counterproductive and weakening the entire industry rivalry, having developed a single reasonable plan for the development of the American space program. However, in fact, all his projects in this area were soon taken away by rivals: the Air Force was not going to give up control over military rocket engineering, and the national law on aeronautics and space, signed in July 1958, created a new civilian agency that took on all the issues related to space, not related to weapons. However, after the creation of the ARPA, it found reasons to survive, as it received major research projects in the areas of protection against ballistic missiles and the detection of nuclear tests. However, it also became a working platform for small projects that various military agencies wanted to explore. So instead of a dog, control has become a tail.

The last selected project was the Orion Project , a nuclear-powered spacecraft (“explode”). ARPA stopped financing it in 1959, because it could not present it as anything but a purely civilian project that fell under the purview of NASA. In turn, NASA did not want to dirty its pure reputation by contacting nuclear weapons. The Air Force reluctantly threw up some money for the project to continue to develop, but he eventually died after the 1963 agreement banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere or space. And although this idea was technically very interesting, it is hard to imagine that any government would give the go-ahead to launch a rocket filled with thousands of nuclear bombs.

The first invasion of ARPA in the field of computers happened simply because of the need to take control of something. In 1961, the Air Force had two inactive assets on its hands that needed to be loaded with something. As the first SAGE Air Force detection centers approached the deployment, the RAND Corporation from Santa Monica (California) was recruited to train personnel and equip twenty-small computerized air defense centers with control programs. For this work, RAND spawned a whole new entity, the System Development Corporation (SDC). The SDC experience in software turned out to be valuable for the Air Force, but the SAGE project was completed, and they had nothing to do. The second idle asset was an extremely expensive extra computer, the AN / FSQ-32, which was requisitioned from IBM for the SAGE project, but was later found unnecessary. The Defense Ministry solved both problems, giving ARPA a new research task related to command centers, and promised a grant of $ 6 million for the SDC to study the problems of command centers with Q-32.

Soon, ARPA decided to regulate this research program as part of a new information processing research unit. Around the same time, the management received a new task - to create a program in the field of behavioral science. It is not clear for what reasons, but the management of the department decided to hire Liclayder for the post of director of both programs. Perhaps it was the idea of ​​Gene Fubini, director of research at the Ministry of Defense, who knew Lika to work on SAGE.

Like Beranek at the time, Jack Ruin, who then led the ARPA, had no idea what he was facing when he invited Lika to an interview. He believed that he was receiving a behavioral expert with some computer science knowledge. Instead, he was confronted with the full power of the ideas of human-computer symbiosis. Lick argued that a computerized control center would require interactive computers, and therefore the main engine of the ARPA research program should be a breakthrough at the leading edge of interactive computers. And for Lika, it meant sharing time.

Time sharing

Time-sharing systems appeared on the same basic principle as the Clarke TX series: computers should be user-friendly. But, unlike Clark, supporters of time sharing believed that one person could not effectively use the whole computer. The researcher can sit for a few minutes studying the output of the program, before making a small change in it and restarting it. And in this interval, the computer will have nothing to do, its greatest power will be idle, and it will be expensive. Even the intervals between keystrokes of hundreds of milliseconds seemed like huge chasms of wasted computer time in which thousands of calculations could be performed.

All this computing power may not be wasted if it can be shared among many users. Sharing computer attention so that it serves each user in turn, the computer developer could kill two birds with one stone - to provide the illusion of an interactive computer that is completely under the control of the user, without losing a large part of the computational capacity of expensive equipment.

This concept was laid back in SAGE, which could serve dozens of different operators at the same time, each of which tracked its own airspace sector. When he met Clark, Lick immediately saw the potential of combining user separation in SAGE with the interactive freedom of TX-0 and TX-2 to create a new, powerful mixture, which formed the basis of his propaganda of human-computer symbiosis presented to him by the Defense Ministry in 1957 " Truly wise system, or Forward, to hybrid thinking systems machine / person ”[sage eng. - sage / approx. trans.]. In this work, he described a computer system for scientists, very similar to SAGE in structure, with input via a light gun, and "simultaneous use (with quick time sharing) of the machine's ability to calculate and store information by many people."

However, Lika himself did not have the engineering skills to develop or create such a system. He learned the basics of programming from BBN, but that was his limit. The first person to implement the time-sharing theory was John McCarthy, a MIT mathematician. McCarthy needed constant access to a computer to create tools and models for manipulating mathematical logic - in his opinion, the first steps to artificial intelligence. In 1959, he made a prototype consisting of an interactive module bolted to the IBM 704 university computer with batch processing. Ironically, the first “time-sharing device” had only one interactive console — the Flexowriter teletype.

But by the early 1960s, MIT's engineering department had come to the need for active investment in interactive computing. Computers were used by every student and teacher who was interested in programming. Batch processing of data very effectively used computer time, however, researchers lost a lot of time - the average task processing time on the 704th was more than a day.

To study the long-term plans to meet the growing demands for computing resources at MIT, a university committee was organized, in which time-split supporters prevailed. Clark argued that the transition to interactivity does not mean time sharing. He said that, from a practical point of view, sharing time meant abandoning interactive video displays and real-time interaction — and these were crucial aspects of the project he was working on at the MIT biophysics laboratory. But on a more fundamental level, apparently, Clark had a deep philosophical rejection of the idea of ​​sharing his workplace. Until 1990, he refused to connect his computer to the Internet, stating that the networks are a “mistake” and they “do not work”.

He and his students formed a “sub-culture”, a tiny process within the framework of an eccentric academic culture of interactive computers. However, their arguments in favor of small workstations, which do not need to be shared with anyone, did not convince their colleagues. Considering the cost of even the smallest individual computer at the time, such an approach from the point of view of other engineers looked economically unreasonable. In addition, the majority at that time believed that computers — the intellectual power stations of the advancing information age — would benefit from economies of scale, just as power plants received them. In the spring of 1961, the final report of the committee authorized the creation of large time-sharing systems as part of the development of MIT.

By that time, Fernando Corbato, for his colleagues at Corby, was already working on increasing the scale of the McCarthy experiment. He was a physicist by training, and he found out about computers while working at Whirlwind in 1951, while still a MIT graduate student (the only one of all the participants in this story who survived - in January 2019 he was 92). Having defended his doctoral thesis, he became an administrator in the newly formed MIT computer center created on the basis of IBM 704. Corbato with the team (originally Marge Mervin and Bob Daly, two of the center's best programmers) called their time-sharing system CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System, " compatible time sharing system ”) - since it could work simultaneously with the normal work process of the 704th, automatically picking up computer cycles for users as needed. Without such compatibility, this project could not work, because Corby did not have funding for the purchase of a new computer on which to create a time-sharing system from scratch, and the existing batch processing operations could not be stopped.

By the end of 1961, CTSS could support four terminals. By 1963, MIT placed two copies of CTSS on IBM 7094 transistors, each with a cost of 3.5 million, about 10 times the previous 704th in memory capacity and processor power. The control software went through the active users in a circle, servicing each of them for a fraction of a second, and then moving on to the next. Users could save for later use of the program and data in their own disk space, protected by a password.


Corbato in his trademark bow tie in the computer room with IBM 7094


Corby explains the time-sharing work scheme, including a two-level queue, in a 1963 TV show.

Each computer could service approximately 20 terminals. This was enough not only to support a couple of small terminal rooms, but also to spread access to a computer throughout Cambridge. Corby and other key engineers had their own terminals in the office, and from that point on, MIT began providing home terminals to technicians so that they could work with the system outside office hours without having to travel to work. All early terminals consisted of a converted typewriter capable of reading data and issuing it over a telephone line, and perforated paper of constant supply. The modems connected terminals by telephone with a private switch in MIT, through which they could connect to the CTSS computer. The computer thus extended its senses through the telephone and the signals, which were converted from digital to analog and vice versa. This was the first stage of integrating computers with a telecommunications network. The integration has been promoted by the ambiguous state of affairs of AT & T from the point of view of regulatory rules. The network was still regulated, and the company was required to provide leased lines at fixed rates, but several FCC decisions blurred the company's control over the periphery, and that little could be said about connecting various devices to its lines. Therefore, MIT did not need permissions on the terminals.


Typical computer terminal mid 1960s: IBM 2741.

The final goal of Liclayder, McCarthy and Corbato was to increase the availability of computing power for individual researchers. They chose the tools and time sharing for economic reasons: no one could imagine that for every researcher at MIT they would buy their own computer. However, this choice led to the appearance of unintended side effects that could not be realized in the Clark paradigm of “one person, one computer”. The shared file system and cross-references to user accounts allowed them to share with each other, work together and complement each other's work. In 1965, Noel Morris and Tom van Vleck accelerated collaboration and communication by creating a MAIL program that allowed users to exchange messages. , - . , LOGIN « ». , MIT , .

Lick, accepting the ARPA proposal and leaving BBN to head the new ARPA division, the Information Processing Techniques Office, IPTO, in 1962, quickly engaged in what he had promised: concentrating the company's research efforts in the area of ​​distribution and improvement computing. equipment and software for time sharing. He abandoned the usual practice of processing research proposals that were supposed to come to his desk, and he himself went to the “fields”, telling engineers to create research proposals that he would like to approve.

His first step was to reconfigure the existing research project of the SDC command centers in Santa Monica. The team from Lika's office at the SDC came to reduce the efforts in the direction of these studies and concentrate on turning the SAGE computer into a time-sharing system. Lik believed that you first need to lay the foundation in the form of human-machine interaction with the division of time, and only command centers will appear later. The fact that such a prioritization coincided with his philosophical interests was only a happy coincidence. Jules Schwartz, a veteran of the SAGE project, developed a new time sharing system. Like its contemporary CTSS, it has become a virtual meeting placeand among its teams there was a DIAL function for sending personal text messages from one user to another - as in the following example, the exchange between John Jones and the user with an id of 9.

DIAL 9 THIS IS JOHN JONES, I NEED 20K IN ORDER TO LOAD MY PROG
FROM 9 WE CAN GET YOU ON IN 5 MINUTES.
FROM 9 GO AHEAD AND LOAD

DIAL 9 20K
9 5
9

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The last seed Lick threw at Berkeley, at the University of California. Launched in 1963, Genie12 spawned the Berkeley Timesharing System, a commercially oriented copy of a smaller Project MAC. Although nominally it was managed by several university professors, student Mel Parentl actually did work, and other students helped him — in particular, Chuck Tucker, Peter Deutsch, and Butler Lampson. Some of them already contracted the interactivity virus in Cambridge before they got to Berkeley. Deutsch, the son of a MIT physics professor and a fan of building computer prototypes, was a teenager who implemented the Lisp programming language on the Digital PDP-1 before he became a student at Berkeley. Lampson was a PDP-1 programmer at the Cambridge electron accelerator as a Harvard student.Partle and the team created a time sharing system on SDS 930, created by Scientific Data Systems, a new computer company based in Santa Monica in 1961 (you can write a whole separate article about the technical accomplishments that took place in Santa Monica at that time. RAND Corporation, SDC and SDS, whose headquarters were located there, contributed to the advanced 1960s computer hardware.

SDS integrated software from Berkeley into its new project, SDS 940. It became one of the most popular time-sharing computer systems in the late 1960s. Tymshare and Comshare, which commercialized time sharing by selling remote computing services, bought dozens of SDS 940s. Partle and the team also decided to try their hand at the commercial market, and founded Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC) in 1968, but during the recession of 1969-1970, they filed for bankruptcy. A large part of the Payrtla team ended up at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Tucker, Deutsch and Lampson contributed to iconic projects, including the Alto personal workstation, local area networks, and a laser printer.


Mel Pairtl (center) next to the Berkeley Timesharing System

Of course, not every time sharing project from the 1960s was created thanks to Liclayder. News about what was happening at MIT and Lincoln laboratories was spread through technical literature, conferences, academic acquaintances, and staff transitions from one job to another. Thanks to these channels, other seeds, driven by the wind, have taken root. At the University of Illinois, Don Bitzer sold his PLATO system to the Department of Defense, which was supposed to reduce the cost of technical training for military personnel. Clifford Shaw created the JOHNNIAC Open Shop System (JOSS), funded by the Air Force, and designed to enhance the ability of RAND employees to quickly perform numerical analysis. The Dartmouth time-sharing system was directly related to the events at MIT, but otherwise it was a completely unique project,made for money exclusively by civilians from the National Science Foundation in the context of the assumption that computer experience will become a necessary part of the education of the next generation of US leaders.

By the mid-1960s, the division of time had not yet fully captured the ecosystem of computers. Traditional batch processing enterprises prevailed, both in sales and in popularity, especially outside university campuses. But it still found its niche.

Taylor Office

In the summer of 1964, about two years after arriving at ARPA, Liklider changed jobs again, this time moving to an IBM research center north of New York. Shocked by the loss of the Project MAC contract in favor of rival computer maker General Electric, after many years of good relations with MIT, Leek had to share his first-hand experience with IBM in a trend that seemed to pass by the company. For Lika, the new job offered the opportunity to turn the last bastion of the usual batch processing into a new faith of interactivity (but didn’t grow together - Lika was pushed into the background, and his wife suffered while isolated off the beaten path in Yorktown Heights. He transferred to IBM's Cambridge office, and then in 1967 he returned to MIT to head Project MAC).

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• Richard J. Barber Associates, The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958-1974 (1975)
• Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (1996)
• Severo M. Ornstein, Computing in the Middle Ages: A View From the Trenches, 1955-1983 (2002)
• M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (2001)