Some of the earliest and most important work in interactive graphics and virtual reality was taking place at the University of Utah using ARPA money. MIT in particular, seemed to breed one groundbreaking development after another. There Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert were engaged in important early work in artificial intelligence. Programs at other institutions focused on advanced programming techniques, time-sharing, and computer languages.
Building a network as an end in itself wasnât Taylorâs principal objective. He was trying to solve a problem he had seen grow worse with each round of funding. Researchers were duplicating, and isolating, costly computing resources. Not only were the scientists at each site engaging in more, and more diverse, computer research, but their demands for computer resources were growing faster than Taylorâs budget. Every new project required setting up a new and costly computing operation. Depending on the computer being used and the number of graduate students being supported, IPTOâs individual grants ranged from $500,000 to $3 million.
And none of the resources or results was easily shared. If the scientists doing graphics in Salt Lake City wanted to use the programs developed by the people at Lincoln Lab, they had to fly to Boston. Still more frustrating, if after a trip to Boston people in Utah wanted to start a similar project on their own machine, they would need to spend considerable time and money duplicating what they had just seen. In those days, 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.
Beyond cost-cutting, Taylorâs idea revealed something very profound. A machineâs ability to amplify human intellectual power was precisely what Licklider had had in mind while writing his paper on human-machine symbiosis six years earlier. Of course, Lickliderâs ideas about time-sharing were already bearing fruit at universities all over the country. But the networking idea marked a significant departure from time-sharing. In a resource-sharing network, many machines would serve many different users, and a researcher interested in using, say, a particular graphics program on a machine two thousand miles away would simply log on to that machine. The idea of one computer reaching out to tap resources inside another, as peers in a collaborative organization, represented the most advanced conception yet to emerge from Lickliderâs vision.
Taylor had the money, and he had Herzfeldâs support, but needed a program manager who could oversee the design and construction of such a network, someone who not only knew Lickliderâs ideas but believed in them. This person had to be a first-rate computer scientist, comfortable with a wide range of technical issues.
How it was to be achieved didnât concern Taylor greatly, as long as the network was reliable and fast. Those were his priorities. Interactive computing meant youâd get a quick response from a computer, so in the modern computing environment it made sense that a network also should be highly responsive. And to be useful, it had to be working anytime you needed it. Whoever designed such a network needed to be an expert in telecommunications systems as well. It wasnât an easy combination to find. But Taylor already had someone in mind: a shy, deep-thinking young computer scientist from the Lincoln Labs breeding ground named Larry Roberts.
In early 1966, Roberts was at Lincoln working on graphics. But he had also done quite a lot of work in communications. He had just completed one of the most relevant proof-of-principle experiments in networking to date, hooking together two computers a continent apart. Taylor had funded Robertsâs experiment. It had been successful enough to
Building a network as an end in itself wasnât Taylorâs principal objective. He was trying to solve a problem he had seen grow worse with each round of funding. Researchers were duplicating, and isolating, costly computing resources. Not only were the scientists at each site engaging in more, and more diverse, computer research, but their demands for computer resources were growing faster than Taylorâs budget. Every new project required setting up a new and costly computing operation. Depending on the computer being used and the number of graduate students being supported, IPTOâs individual grants ranged from $500,000 to $3 million.
And none of the resources or results was easily shared. If the scientists doing graphics in Salt Lake City wanted to use the programs developed by the people at Lincoln Lab, they had to fly to Boston. Still more frustrating, if after a trip to Boston people in Utah wanted to start a similar project on their own machine, they would need to spend considerable time and money duplicating what they had just seen. In those days, 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.
Beyond cost-cutting, Taylorâs idea revealed something very profound. A machineâs ability to amplify human intellectual power was precisely what Licklider had had in mind while writing his paper on human-machine symbiosis six years earlier. Of course, Lickliderâs ideas about time-sharing were already bearing fruit at universities all over the country. But the networking idea marked a significant departure from time-sharing. In a resource-sharing network, many machines would serve many different users, and a researcher interested in using, say, a particular graphics program on a machine two thousand miles away would simply log on to that machine. The idea of one computer reaching out to tap resources inside another, as peers in a collaborative organization, represented the most advanced conception yet to emerge from Lickliderâs vision.
Taylor had the money, and he had Herzfeldâs support, but needed a program manager who could oversee the design and construction of such a network, someone who not only knew Lickliderâs ideas but believed in them. This person had to be a first-rate computer scientist, comfortable with a wide range of technical issues.
How it was to be achieved didnât concern Taylor greatly, as long as the network was reliable and fast. Those were his priorities. Interactive computing meant youâd get a quick response from a computer, so in the modern computing environment it made sense that a network also should be highly responsive. And to be useful, it had to be working anytime you needed it. Whoever designed such a network needed to be an expert in telecommunications systems as well. It wasnât an easy combination to find. But Taylor already had someone in mind: a shy, deep-thinking young computer scientist from the Lincoln Labs breeding ground named Larry Roberts.
In early 1966, Roberts was at Lincoln working on graphics. But he had also done quite a lot of work in communications. He had just completed one of the most relevant proof-of-principle experiments in networking to date, hooking together two computers a continent apart. Taylor had funded Robertsâs experiment. It had been successful enough to
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