Where Wizards Stay Up Late Quotes

“At its core, all engineering comes down to making tradeoffs between the perfect and the workable.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“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.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“It’s one thing when you plug into a socket in the wall and electrons flow,” said Bob Kahn. “It’s another thing when you have to figure out, for every electron, which direction it takes.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“Analogously, some water out of the tap is used for making coffee, some for washing dishes, and some for bathing, but the pipe and faucet don’t care; they convey the water regardless. The host-to-host protocol was to perform essentially the same function in the infrastructure of the network.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“It might be possible to connect computers in a network redundantly, so that if one line went down, a message could take another path. “Is it going to be hard to do?” Herzfeld asked. “Oh no. We already know how to do it,” Taylor responded with characteristic boldness. “Great idea,” Herzfeld said. “Get it going. You’ve got a million dollars more in your budget right now. Go.” Taylor left Herzfeld’s office on the E-ring and headed back to the corridor that connected to the D-ring and his own office. He glanced at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he said to himself softly. “That only took twenty minutes.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.” Lick’s”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign used e-mail several times a day in the autumn of 1976. The system they were using was a basic mailbox program, a technology already more than a decade old. But for a political campaign this was a revolutionary stroke in communications. On that basis, Carter was labeled the “computer-driven candidate.” By”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“Most important of all, ARPA staffers recognized the agency’s biggest mistake yet: It had not been tapping the universities where much of the best scientific work was being done. The scientific community, predictably, rallied to the call for a reinvention of ARPA as a “high-risk, high-gain” research sponsor—the kind of R&D shop they had dreamed of all along. Their dream was realized; ARPA was given its new mission. As ARPA’s features took shape, one readily apparent characteristic of the agency was that its relatively small size allowed the personality of its director to permeate the organization. In time, the “ARPA style”—freewheeling, open to high risk, agile—would be vaunted. Other Washington bureaucrats came to envy ARPA’s modus operandi. Eventually the agency attracted an elite corps of hard-charging R&D advocates from the finest universities and research laboratories, who set about building a community of the best technical and scientific minds in American research. The”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“Cosell and Walden drank a lot of Coke to keep themselves going; Crowther never touched the stuff. He was a notoriously finicky eater (anything beyond the culinary level of a plain bologna sandwich was a risk), making him an impossible dinner guest or dining companion.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“Unskilled programmers often ended up writing assembly-language programs that wandered aimlessly, like some hapless Arctic expedition in a blizzard.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“Who but a few government bureaucrats or computer scientists would ever use a computer network? It wasn’t as if computing had a mass market like the television networks or the phone company.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“The idea was that if they could get into MIT they were smart, and if they dropped out, you could get them cheaper.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“Conceptually, this was an approach borrowed more from the world of freight movers than communications experts. Think of each message as if it were a large house and ask yourself how you would move that house across the country from, say, Boston to Los Angeles. Theoretically, you could move the whole structure in one piece. House movers do it over shorter distances all the time—slowly and carefully. However, it’s more efficient to disassemble the structure if you can, load the pieces onto trucks, and drive those trucks over the nation’s interstate highway system—another kind of distributed network. Not every truck will take the same route; some drivers might go through Chicago and some through Nashville. If a driver learns that the road is bad around Kansas City, for example, he may take an alternate route. As long as each driver has clear instructions telling him where to deliver his load and he is told to take the fastest way he can find, chances are that all the pieces will arrive at their destination in L.A. and the house can be reassembled on a new site. In some cases the last truck to leave Boston might be the first to arrive in L.A., but if each piece of the house carries a label indicating its place in the overall structure, the order of arrival doesn’t matter. The rebuilders can find the right parts and put them together in the right places. In”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“software programs were one-of-a-kind, like original works of art, and not easily transferred from one machine to another. Taylor was convinced of the technical feasibility of sharing such resources over a computer network, though it had never been done.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“In the beginning ARPA created the Arpanet. "And the Arpanet was without form and void. "And darkness was upon the deep.
"And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, 'Let there be a protocol,' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.
"And ARPA said, 'Let there be more protocols,' and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.
"And ARPA said, 'Let there be more networks,' and it was so.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

“Like Roberts's first paper outlining the proposed Arpanet seven years earlier, the Cerf-Kahn paper of May 1974 described something revolutionary. Under the framework described in the paper, messages should be encapsulated and decapsulated in "datagrams," much as a letter is put into and taken out of an envelope, and sent as end-to-end packets. These messages would be called transmission-control protocol, or TCP, messages. The paper also introduced the notion of gateways, which would read only the envelope so that only the receiving hosts would read the contents.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

“With the exception of a few supporters at Bell Laboratories who understood digital technology, AT&T continued to resist the idea. The most outspoken skeptics were some of AT&T’s most senior technical people. “After I heard the melodic refrain of ‘bullshit’ often enough,” Baran recalled, “I was motivated to go away and write a series of detailed memoranda papers, to show, for example, that algorithms were possible that allowed a short message to contain all the information it needed to find its own way through the network.” With each objection answered, another was raised and another piece of a report had to be written. By the time Baran had answered all of the concerns raised by the defense, communications, and computer science communities, nearly four years had passed and his volumes numbered eleven.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

“said Kleinrock, “By and large, a programmer simply wants to get a piece of software that works. That’s hard enough. Whether it works efficiently or well is not usually the issue.”
― Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet