Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Matthew Lyon Page B

This time Roberts was more forthcoming. He told Taylor politely but unequivocally that he was enjoying his work at Lincoln and had no desire to become a Washington bureaucrat.
    Disconsolate, Taylor went to Cambridge to visit Lick, who was now back at MIT ensconced in a research effort on time-sharing called Project MAC. They discussed who else might be well suited to the job. Lick suggested a few people, but Taylor rejected them. He wanted Roberts. From then on, every two months or so, during visits to ARPA’s other Boston-area contractors, Taylor called on Roberts to try to persuade him to change his mind.
    It had been nearly a year since Taylor’s twenty-minute conversation with Herzfeld, and the networking idea was floundering for lack of a program manager. One day in late 1966, Taylor returned to the ARPA director’s office.
    â€œIsn’t it true that ARPA is giving Lincoln at least fifty-one percent of its funding?” Taylor asked his boss.
    â€œYes, it is,” Herzfeld responded, slightly puzzled.
    Taylor then explained the difficulty he was having getting the engineer he wanted to run the networking program.
    â€œWho is it?” Herzfeld asked.
    Taylor told him. Then he asked his boss another question. Would Herzfeld call the director of Lincoln Lab and ask him to call Roberts in and tell him that it would be in his own best interest—and in Lincoln’s best interest—to agree to take the Washington job?
    Herzfeld picked up his telephone and dialed Lincoln Lab. He got the director on the line and said just what Taylor had asked him to say. It was a short conversation but, from what Taylor could tell, Herzfeld encountered no resistance. Herzfeld hung up, smiled at Taylor, and said, “Well, okay. We’ll see what happens.” Two weeks later, Roberts accepted the job.
    Larry Roberts was twenty-nine years old when he walked into the Pentagon as ARPA’s newest draftee. He fit in quickly, and his dislike of idle time soon became legendary. Within a few weeks, he had the place—one of the world’s largest, most labyrinthine buildings—memorized. Getting around the building was complicated by the fact that certain hallways were blocked off as classified areas. Roberts obtained a stopwatch and began timing various routes to his frequent destinations. ”Larry’s Route” soon became commonly known as the fastest distance between any two Pentagon points.
    Even before his first day at ARPA, Roberts had a rudimentary outline of the computer network figured out. Then, and for years afterward as the project grew, Roberts drew meticulous network diagrams, sketching out where the data lines should go, and the number of hops between nodes. On tracing paper and quadrille pad, he created hundreds of conceptual and logical sketches like these:

    (Later, after the project was under way, Roberts would arrange with Howard Frank, an expert in the field of network topology, to carry out computer-based analyses on how to lay out the network most cost-effectively. Still, for years Roberts had the network’s layout, and the technical particulars that defined it, sharply pictured inside his head.)
    A lot was already known about how to build complicated communications networks to carry voice, sound, and other more elemental signals. AT&T, of course, had absolute hegemony when it came to the telephone network. But the systematic conveyance of information predated Ma Bell by at least a few thousand years. Messenger systems date at least as far back as the reign of Egyptian King Sesostris I, almost four thousand years ago. The first relay system, where a message was passed from one guard station to the next, came about in 650 B.C. For hundreds of years thereafter, invention was driven by the necessity for greater speed as the transmission of messages from one place to another progressed through pigeons, shouters, coded flags, mirrors, lanterns, torches, and beacons. Then, in