Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

by Katie Hafner

“The process of technological development is like building a cathedral,” remarked Baran years later. “Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’ Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

“But I think the more important thing was that we took it to heart more than the other contenders. We made the design our problem and did our best to find solutions we believed in without bowing too much to the specifications others had put down.”

“There was an infinity of ways we could go wrong, and a substantial number of ways to go right,” said Walden, the first programmer Heart had signed on. “Good engineers find one of the ways of going right.”

Above cost, performance, or anything else, reliability was their top priority—design for it, build for it, prepare for the worst, and above all, don’t put your machine in a position to fail.

“I did not feel excluded by a little core of protocol kings. I felt included by a friendly group of people who recognized that the purpose of networking was to bring everybody in.”

Kahn too acknowledged that the demonstration was “set up to force the utility of the network to occur to the end users.”

“E-mail was seen as something between consenting adults,”

The speed of electronic mail promoted flaming, some said; anyone hot could shoot off a retort on the spot, and without the moderating factor of having to look the target in the eye.