Brugge Blog

I hadn’t noticed until I was done that my time reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet had all been when I was staying up later than I probably should. Not that that’s an unusual reading pattern for me, but I hadn’t noticed the geeky symmetry while I was in it.

I think I’m just a sucker for computer history books because I ate this one up. It’s not quite on par with The Soul of a New Machine, my all-time favorite in that area, but it’s a compelling story nonetheless: where did this thing called the Internet that seemed to show up in our living room fully formed come from?

I was also fascinated by how close to the beginning of some of this I was, without really realizing it. I started grad school in 1985, and got a “.edu” e-mail address, yet even though I knew it was kind of a new thing, I didn’t realize until reading this that the DNS domains were that new. Either that or my memory is as filmy as ever, and I don’t remember now how exciting and new it really felt back then. Either way, it was still a fun read.

A couple of quotes here, the first one grabbed because of a quirky hobby I seem to have: finding historical accounts of lessons learned in one arena that we need to learn over again in another arena or in the next generation.

Honeywell hadn’t attempted to to develop any diagnostics to test the design; it had simply tried to produce a faithful implementation of the block diagrams that [Severo] Ornstein had drawn and that BBN had included in its proposal to DARPA….
In building new computers, said [Ben] Barker, the operative assumption is that you design something that you think will work, get the prototype ready, start testing, then gradually fix the design errors until the machine passes the test. (p. 125-126)

Alter the topic above to “software” rather than “hardware” and you could say that people understood long ago the need for techniques that we’re calling “agile development” today. And that software development maybe isn’t all that different from other places where we’re not sure exactly where we want to end up when we begin.

Then there is Bob Kahn, the network theorist who got sucked into a huge design and engineering effort to learn what it felt like to put theory into practice.

Bob Kahn had just devoted a year of his life to demonstrating that resource-sharing over a network could really work. But at some point in the course of the [ICCC] event, he turned to a colleague and remarked, “You know, everyone really uses this thing for electronic mail.” (p. 186)

There is an interview with him over on NerdTV, but I didn’t hear any quotes there as good as this one.