Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

by Katie Hafner

The engineers at BBN relished opportunities to spook the telephone company repair people with their ability to detect, and eventually predict, line trouble from afar. By examining the data, BBN could sometimes predict that a line was about to go down. The phone company’s repair offices had never heard of such a thing and didn’t take to it well. When BBN’s loopback tests determined there was trouble on a line, say, between Menlo Park (Stanford) and Santa Barbara, one of Heart’s engineers in Cambridge picked up the phone and called Pacific Bell. ”You’re having trouble with your line between Menlo Park and Santa Barbara,” he’d say. “Are you calling from Menlo Park or Santa Barbara?” the Pacific Bell technician would ask. ”I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” “Yeah, right.”