Take a look at the standard textbooks on post-World War II America. You will search in vain through the index for references to the Internet or its predecessor, the ARPANET; even mentions of “computers” are few and far between. The gap is hardly a unique fault of these authors; after all, before 1988, the New York Times mentioned the Internet only once—in a brief aside. Still, it is a fair guess that the textbooks of the next century will devote considerable attention to the Internet and the larger changes in information and communications technology that have emerged so dramatically in recent years. Few will share Wired publisher Louis Rossetto’s hyperbolic claim that the digital revolution presages “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.¹” But most historians will feel compelled to reckon with the Internet’s emergence as a standard feature of everyday life.

How will that history be written? Four recent works offer some clues by addressing the history of the Internet from different perspectives (biographic, bureaucratic, ideological, and social) and considering different sources for the “creation” of the internet—from inventive engineers and solid government bureaucrats to the broader social context of the Cold War or the 1960s. Although the Internet may be heralded as an entirely novel development, its historians have generally followed some well-worn paths in the history of technology. These conventional approaches are often illuminating, but the full story will only be told when we get a history that brings together biographical and institutional studies with a fully contextualized social and cultural history. The rise of the Net needs to be rooted in the 1960s—in both the “closed world” of the Cold War and the open and decentralized world of the antiwar movement and the counterculture. Understanding this dual heritage enables us to better understand current controversies over whether the Internet will be "open" or "closed"—over whether the Net will foster democratic dialogue or centralized hierarchy, community or capitalism, or some mixture of both.

“Contextualist” approaches have long dominated academic studies of the history of technology, but narratives of “great men” of science and technology remain popular, deriving their power from widespread assumptions about new ideas emerging from particular men of genius as well as from the narrative appeal of biography.² The title of Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s well-written and extensively researched work of popular history "Where the Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet>," neatly inscribes the book’s great man approach. So does the dust jacket, which promises “the fascinating story of a group of young computer whizzes . . . who . . . invented the most important communications medium since the telephone.”³

Hafner and Lyon begin their tale of "origins”"with Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the computer consulting company that had the initial contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) for what became known as the ARPANET. (Founded in 1957 in the post-Sputnik panic over Soviet technological prowess, ARPA, a Defense Department unit, supported research and development in technology, particularly military-oriented systems like ballistic missile defense.) The book’s prologue describes a reunion of ARPANET’s designers at BBN in 1994. This narrative choice and the centrality of BBN to the entire book owe a great deal to the study’s origins in a suggestion from BBN, which opened its archives to Hafner and Lyon and even helped fund the project.⁴

Having started with the contractor, Hafner and Lyon explain the source of the contract with another story. As they tell it, Bob Taylor, the head of the ARPA office that dealt with computer research (known as the Information Processing Techniques Office), faced an "irksome" problem in the winter of 1966. The room next to Taylor’s office housed three computer terminals, each connected to a mainframe running at a different site funded by ARPA. Since the different terminals reflected different computer systems, program languages, and operating systems, they required different login procedures and commands. “It became obvious,” Taylor later remembered, “that we ought to find a way to connect all these different machines” and, thus, share extremely expensive computer equipment. “Great idea,” his boss responded. “You’ve got a million dollars more in your budget right now. Go.”⁵

After Taylor won funding for his project, he turned to "a shy, deep-thinking young computer scientist . . . named Larry Roberts" who was "blessed with incredible stamina” and “had a reputation for being something of a genius" to "oversee the design and construction of the network." In 1967, at a meeting in Ann Arbor, Wes Clark of Washington University came up with the crucial idea of making the network function by inserting a subnetwork of smaller computers between the host computers and the network lines—what later came to be a called Interface Message Processors or IMPs. Riding to the airport in a cab, Clark told Roberts that only Frank Heart could build such a network at a reasonable cost. Heart too is a wizard: “intensely loyal” and “nurturing,” he has “prodigious energy” and the ability to make “certain that jobs he signed up for really got done.” And with his help, BBN, the Cambridge consulting company where he worked, snared the million-dollar contract to build what comes to be called the ARPANET. (When BBN won the contract for the Interface> Message Processors, Senator Edward Kennedy sent them a famous telegram congratulating them on the “ecumenism” of their planned work on the “Interfaith> Message Processor.”)⁶

But why begin with Taylor and BBN? Many popular narratives of the rise of the Internet start earlier and with a story that is more grounded in a particular historical context. A widely distributed “Brief History of the Internet” by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling opens: “Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America’s foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war?” The solution, as Sterling explains it, emerged in 1964 from the Rand Corporation and particularly from engineer Paul Baran, who imagined a network with no central authority, which “would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability.”⁷ Unlike a centralized network in which destroying the central switching point brings down the entire structure, Baran theorized that a distributed network could sustain multiple hits and keep working through alternative channels. Crucial to Baran’s distributed network was his second key innovation, using digital technology to break up messages into discrete pieces that could be sent individually and then reassembled at the end point—a feature that builds more reliability into the system, and makes more effective use of communications lines than telephone circuit-switching technology. (Telephone circuits set up a dedicated line between two people through which they send a continuous stream of words; if the participants turn silent for a minute, they continue to use the circuit. Packet-switching networks are much more efficient because the “words” are broken into smaller chunks of data, which can flow through multiple paths and also share the same lines with other pieces of data.) British physicist Donald Davies, who later developed some similar networking ideas, gave Baran’s “message blocks” the name “packets”—a rubric that has stuck today and is embodied in the notion of “packet switching networks”—the core technology of the Internet.⁸

Starting with Baran instead of Taylor roots the Internet in the darkness of the Cold War rather than the bright idea of a clever engineer and emphasizes surviving (or fighting) nuclear war rather than sharing computer resources. Baran’s work, he later told an interviewer, “was done in response to the most dangerous situation that ever existed.” Like his contemporary at Rand, Herman Kahn (the model for “Dr. Strangelove” in the cold war satire that appeared the same year as Baran’s report), Baran thought the unthinkable—how to carry on after a nuclear apocalypse. “If war does not mean the end of earth in a black-and-white manner,” Baran wrote, “then it follows that we should do those things that make the shade of gray as light as possible: . . . to do all those things to permit the survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct their economy swiftly.”⁹

Hafner and Lyon do not ignore Baran, but they downplay his significance as part of de-emphasizing the military origins of the Net even while they make clear that Baran’s ideas were crucial in the development of the ARPANET. They credit Baran with putting in some of the Internet’s “blocks” and “stones” but not with being its “architect.” Roberts himself later put Baran more in the center of things, noting that when he read Baran’s reports in 1967: “suddenly I learned how to route packets. So we talked to Paul and used all of his concepts and put together the [APRANET] proposal.”¹⁰ But the real point for Hafner and Lyon is about intentions, not credit; the ARPANET, they insist, “embodied the most peaceful intentions to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. . . . ARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.”¹¹

>Starting with Taylor’s effort to connect disparate computers, Hafner and Lyon weave a lively tale of the origins of the Internet. But their biographical focus slights the technical and intellectual (as well as the military) roots of the ARPANET experiment: the influence, for example, of work on time-sharing computers (machines set up so that they can be used at the same time by multiple users), small scale computer networking projects, and the larger vision of giving people access to the world’s knowledge—a heritage that runs from Diderot’s Encyclopédie> to H. G. Wells’s “world brain” to Vannevar Bush’s “memex” to J. C. R. Licklider’s “libraries of the future.”¹² By de-emphasizing the social and political contexts in which the Net was built, Hafner and Lyon tell a story that most engineers would like—a tale of adventurous young men motivated by technical curiosity and largely unaffected by larger ideological currents or even narrower motives of self-advancement or economic enrichment.

>Given their interest in the engineers and in BBN, Hafner and Lyon devote most of their book to a fast-paced narrative of the design and building of the system. They excel at explicating technical matters for a non-technical audience. But their coverage trails off after they describe the first public demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Conference on Computer Communication in Washington in October 1972. Although that event established the feasibility of packet switching, success at this point was limited. No one had really figured out what the network was good for; as late as the fall of 1971, network traffic was barely two percent of what it could potentially handle; it was, as Hafner and Lyon nicely put it, “like a highway system without cars.”¹³

> The biographic, great man model stretches Hafner and Lyon’s literary talents, in part because the Internet lacks a central founding figure—an Edison or a Morse. It resulted more from bureaucratic teams than inspired individuals. Bureaucracy, however, rarely makes for lively reading. The bureaucrats’ story unfolds with great care and mastery, although little excitement, in Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986> by Arthur L, Norberg and Judy O’Neill (with contributions by Kerry J. Freedman). Just as funding, in part, explains Hafner and Lyon’s focus on BBN, so too does funding explain Norberg and O’Neill’s organizational focus. The book originated from a Defense Department contract to study the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) with the original idea coming from the office’s last director.¹⁴ That support made possible an important set of forty-five interviews, which are extensively used in this book and also in a number of other works on the development of computing, including Hafner and Lyon’s book.

>Norberg and O’Neill consider not just ARPANET but all ARPA computer funding between 1962 and 1986, including for time-sharing, graphics, and artificial intelligence as well as networking. Although their book is scholarly in tone and in its extensive research and documentation, they champion their subjects just as do Hafner and Lyon. Throughout, the authors celebrate IPTO’s “achievements,” “contributions,” “accomplishments,” and “successes.” The book also has its heroes—the bureaucrats who made everything happen. The authors devote one of the book’s six chapters to describing and praising IPTO’s “lean management structure.” The agency’s “technical accomplishments,” they write, “were shaped as much by IPT office management as they were by researchers’ intentions.”¹⁵

>By spotlighting ARPA, Norberg and O’Neill emphasize what Hafner and Lyon sometimes obscure—the close connection of all ARPA computer funding to military concerns. Calling their concluding chapter “Serving the Department of Defense and Nation,” they celebrate rather than downplay that link. They point out, for example, that ARPA only set up the IPTO in 1962 in response to pressure from the Kennedy administration for improved military command and control systems.¹⁶ Computers, it was widely believed, would make it possible to “control greater amounts of information and to present it in more effective ways to aid decision making.” Whereas Hafner and Lyon describe IPTO’s first director J.C.R. Licklider as pushing it toward basic research, Norberg and O’Neill quote him telling another military official that ARPA should only fund research that offers “a good prospect of solving problems that are of interest to the Department of Defense.”¹⁷ Such sentiments were hardly surprising from a man who went to work in the Pentagon the same month as the U.S. and the Soviets teetered on the brink of nuclear war over missiles in Cuba.

Norberg and O’Neill also provide a more complete and complex portrait of the Internet’s ties to military concerns. They agree with Hafner and Lyon that Taylor’s “perceived need to share resources” sparked his initial decision to get funding for ARPANET. But they also show that networking experiments grew out of IPTO’s fundamental concern with using computers to improve military command and control. Norberg and O’Neill further argue that the military origins of the ARPANET made it successful. While “incentives for networking were lacking in the [computing] community,” they “did exist in DOD, where there was a need toreduce the high cost of software development, improve communications among military units while increasing computer use, [and] further develop command and control systems.”¹⁸

In any case, to focus on the particular “originary” moment of Taylor’s search for initial funding is to underplay the Internet’s multiple origins. By 1972, ARPA had shown the feasibility of packet switching, but it had only created a limited and lightly used network, which also operated in a changed political climate. Starting in the late 1960s, White House and Congressional pressure forced ARPA to tie its funding much more closely to military needs.¹⁹ In response to those mandates, ARPA sought to apply directly what it had learned about packet switching to military applications, particularly through packet radio networks and packet satellites. As the additional networks as well as some early commercial networks emerged, Bob Kahn, who had moved from BBN to ARPA in 1972, and others realized that they had now replicated the problem that had vexed Taylor back in 1966: how do you connect incompatible networks—rather than just computers—to each other? (Bob Kahn, interestingly, had a direct connection to one of the Internet’s key alternate origins; it was his cousin Herman Kahn’s works on thermonuclear war that had provided the Cold War context for Paul Baran’s work on packet switching.)²⁰

Out of this military-driven dilemma of “inter-networking” came both the concept and the name of the Internet. Kahn launched the “Internetting Project” to make it possible for “a computer that’s on a satellite net and a computer on a radio net and computer on the ARPANET to communicate uniformly with each other without realizing what’s going on in between.”²¹ In collaboration with Vinton Cerf, Kahn developed in 1974 a new and more independent packet-switching protocol—at first called Transmission Control Protocol or TCP and later TCP/IP with IP standing for “Internet Protocol”—that would serve as a kind of lingua franca for this new Internet and remains so today. Not only did military funding and necessity create this standard, but also the Defense Department’s adoption of the protocol in 1980 for its own operations gave it a crucial boost. Equally important (and surprising given the context) was the Defense Departments public release of TCP/IP—in effect this normally closed and secretive agency fostered a remarkably open (and hence free) standard of communication.²²

But the ultimate triumph of TCP/IP was also—as Janet Abbate’s informative dissertation makes clear—a matter of international politics and commerce. European publicly controlled telecommunication companies pushed an alternative standard (x.25) that would be more compatible with their operations. A key American weapon in the “protocol wars” was Defense Department support, a decision that grew at least in part out of the explicit design of those standards for the military. As a result, TCP/IP boosters could, as Peter Salus notes in Casting the Net, persuade “the military brass that the ARPANET protocols were reliable, available, and survivable.”²³ The victory of TCP/IP is not unconnected to why the U.S. still dominates the Internet.

Norberg and O’Neill provide a thorough institutional study but offer only passing references to the larger political and economic context. They acknowledge that the “political circumstances in the world of the past three decades led the Department of Defense to demand new developments in computing that would help to increase the sophistication and speed of new military systems,” but add that “we will not discuss it in this study”.²⁴ This lack of context also contributes to their largely uncritical view of ARPA’s military mission. Despite the repeated references to military “benefits” and uses of the computer technology that it funded, Norberg and O’Neill never discuss its actual use on the battlefields of Vietnam, which was fought precisely during the heyday of ARPA funding of computer projects.

Although Paul Edwards’s The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America does not focus specifically on the Internet, it still shares many topics and sources with the Norberg and O’Neill and Hafner and Lyon books. Nevertheless, it is also their mirror opposite: whereas Norberg and O’Neill as well Hafner and Lyon eschew context, Edwards places his story squarely within the narrative of the Cold War and emphasizes the world outside the laboratory; whereas Norberg and O’Neill celebrate (and Hafner and Lyon deny) the marriage of defense and computers, Edwards paints a forbidding portrait of their union; whereas Norberg and O’Neill and Hafner and Lyon provide straightforward (and easy to follow) institutional or biographical histories, Edwards, as a student of Donna Haraway and a graduate of the History of Consciousness program at Santa Cruz, draws on and contributes to a large theoretical literature in cultural studies and structures his (sometimes confusing) account more as “collage than linear narrative.” Edwards departs most sharply from other works in his abandonment of the trope of “progress” that marks most writing about the history of technology.²⁵

The richness and complexity of Edwards’s sometimes-brilliant account make it difficult to summarize briefly.²⁶ Edwards contends that the digital computer is both cause and effect of what he calls the “closed-world discourse” of the Cold War, which he defines as “the language, technologies, and practices that together supported the visions of centrally controlled, automated global power at the heart of American Cold War politics.” “Computers,” he writes “created the technological possibility of the Cold War and shaped its political atmosphere.” And, in turn, “the Cold War shaped computer technology.” Cold War politics “became embedded in the machines,” including their technical design” and the “machines helped make possible its politics.” In this way, Edwards goes beyond historians who argue for the “social construction” of technology and focus on how different social groups shape the development of technology and emphasizes instead what he calls the “technological construction of social worlds.” Computers in this analysis, heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, become themselves a source of power and knowledge—or in Edwards’s words, “a crucial infrastructural technology—a crucial Foucaultian support—for the Cold War closed-world discourse.”²⁷

That the Cold War, if not Cold War discourse, fostered the development of digital computers is relatively easy to show.²⁸ In 1950, for example, the federal government—overwhelmingly military agencies—provided seventy-five to eighty percent of computer development funds. Even when companies began funding their own R&D, they did so with the knowledge of a guaranteed military market. Such massive government support enabled American computer research to destroy foreign (mostly British) competition; the American hegemony in computer markets—routinely attributed to American free markets—rests on a solid base of government subsidized military funding. “The computerization of society,” Frank Rose aptly observes, “has essentially been a side effect of the computerization of war.”²⁹

Such facts are relatively well known (although sometimes ignored by ideologues who depict the computer industry as the exemplar of laissez-faire), but Edwards wants to make a deeper argument about the significance of military involvement in computer development. He rejects the idea that “military support for computer research was . . . benign or disinterested”—a view he attributes to historians who take “at face value the public postures of funding agencies and the reports of project leaders.” (He could be talking directly about the Hafner and Lyon and Norberg and O’Neill books, but their work appeared either after or at the same time as his book.)³⁰ Rather, he argues, “practical military objectives guided technological development down particular channels, increased its speed, and helped shape the structure of the emerging computer industry.” For example, he maintains that the shift from analog to digital computing was not the result of the innate technological superiority of the with and support for the vision of centralized command and control of the closed world discourse.³¹ Unfortunately, Edwards never makes clear precisely how computing would look different today without defense funding under the shadow of the Cold War. Would we have analog computers on our desks—or none at all?

But Edwards is more interested in showing that computer technology helped to create and develop the discourse of centralized command and control than in exploring how this vision actually shaped computer design. Computers, he writes, “helped create and sustain this discourse” by allowing the “practical construction of central real-time military control systems on a gigantic scale” and facilitating “the metaphorical understanding of world politics as a sort of a system subject to technological management.”³²

Much of this sounds and is rather abstract, but Edwards leavens the book’s relentless abstractions with a series of rich case studies and anecdotes. We learn, for example, about U.S. Airforce Operation Igloo White. Run from the Infiltration Surveillance Center in Thailand (the largest building in Southeast Asia) and costing nearly $1 billion per year between 1967 and 1972, Igloo White sought to monitor all activity across the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos, including truck noises, body heat, and the scent of human urine. When the sensors (“shaped like twigs, jungle plants, and animal droppings”) picked up signals, they appeared magically on the display terminals as “a moving white ‘worm’ superimposed on a map grid.” Then the computers would project the “worm’s” movements and radio the coordinates to Phantom F-4 Jets, whose computers would guide them to the precise map grid square; the computers back in Thailand controlled the release of the bombs. “The pilot,” observes Edwards, “might do no more than sit and watch as the invisible jungle below suddenly exploded into flames.” It was the perfect fantasy of the closed world of computerized and centralized command and control. In the apt words of one technician: “We wired the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a drugstore pinball machine, and we plug it in every night.” But the “pinballs” were smarter than the players. The Vietcong fooled the sensors with taped truck noises and bags of urine, which duly provoked massive air strikes on empty jungle corridors. These airstrikes were then claimed as quantitative (and quantifiable) successes. A 1971 Senate report found that “truck kills claimed by the Air Force [in Igloo White] last year greatly exceeds the number of trucks believed by the Embassy to be in all of North Vietnam.” Even if the exaggerated claims had been true, they could have only been scored as successes in a crazy world in which it would have cost $100,000 to destroy trucks and supplies worth a few thousand dollars.³³

Igloo White, as Edwards shows, typified computerized Cold War military operations. He devotes a chapter to the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) computerized air defense system, which cost billions of dollars and was obsolete by the time it was fully operational in 1961. But in the irrational closed world of the Cold War SAGE actually “worked,” as Edwards argues. Computer scientists got to pursue their research; corporations like IBM built their dominance of the computer industry with the help of the massive SAGE contract. And on an ideological level SAGE worked by “creating an impression of active defense that assuaged some of the helplessness of nuclear fear” and fostering the myth of centralized control and total defense.

Although Edwards has little to say directly about the ARPANET, it is difficult to read his book and then share Hafner and Lyon’s or Norberg and O’Neill’s view of the connection between the military and the rise of the Internet as accidental or benign. One of the sharpest differences between Edwards’s account and the others is in the depiction of J.R.C. Licklider, who twice directed IPTO and whose famous 1960 paper on “man-machine symbiosis” helped shift computing from computation to communication. For both Hafner and Lyon and Norberg and O’Neill, Licklider is an almost sainted figure. “Everybody adored Licklider,” Hafner and Lyon write. “His restless, versatile genius gave rise through the years to an eclectic cult of admirers.” His “worldview,” they write, “pivoted” on the idea “that technological progress would save humanity.”³⁴

In these other accounts, particularly Hafner and Lyon’s, Licklider’s concern with “man-machine” interaction appears as largely an intellectual problem. But Edwards maintains that it grew directly out of his World War II work in Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustic Lab, which sought to reduce “noise” in battlefield communications systems. Such military concerns continued to inform Licklider’s work after the war. In his 1960 paper, for example, he explains the problem with batch processing (as opposed to real-time interactive computing) by writing: “Imagine trying . . . to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this.” Edwards thus depicts Licklider as tightly wedded to military goals, describing him as “deeply desir[ing] to contribute to new military technologies from his areas of expertise.” Writing in 1978, Licklider expressed some frustration that the World-Wide Military Command and Control System’s computers were not yet “interconnected by an electronic network” and used an operating system designed for “batch processing.” He argued that “military command and control and military communications are prime network applications” and observed that “both interactive computing and networking had their origins in the SAGE system.”³⁵ But regardless of Licklider’s own views, the Defense Department would never have committed funds to projects like ARPANET without the belief that it would ultimately serve specific military objectives and larger Cold War goals.

Computer systems were, thus, invented by the Cold War, which provided the justification for massive government spending and were pushed in particular technological directions. But these same computer systems, in turn, helped to support the discourse of the Cold War; they sustained the fantasy of a closed world that was subject to technological control. Even before ARPANET, the first real computer network was developed by the SAGE project because “the massive integration of a centralized, continental defense control system” required “long-distance communication over telephone lines.”³⁶

If the Internet, like networking and computing, in general, was a “side effect of the computerization of war,” did it also support that militarized and closed vision of the world? On the one hand, the notion of a network of interconnected computers—especially one that could survive nuclear attack—fostered the fantasy of centralized command and control that Edwards sees as crucial to closed world discourse. Moreover, at least in Defense Department hands, the ARPANET was quite literally a “closed world” to which only a select number of ARPA-funded sites had access. But, on the other hand, Baran’s distributed network—perhaps precisely because it responded to a post-nuclear war scenario—could also have nurtured a highly decentralized view of the world. Norberg and O’Neill report, for example, that Defense Department officials initially viewed the new network with suspicion because it would “make it easier for subordinates to send messages without the approval of commanding officers, possibly circumventing the military’s chain of command.”³⁷

And in the 1960s there were plenty of reasons to worry about subversion of the chain of command and of military thinking, in general—a fact that Edwards’s closed world analysis seems to ignore.³⁸ He provides an often-perceptive analysis of some of the key Cold War era films, for example. But he doesn’t give enough weight to the way that films like Dr. Strangelove both popularized the closed world discourse but also undercut it by showing the idea of controlling the nuclear world to be an absurd fantasy. And some leading scientists also came to have some doubts. In December 1968, fifty senior faculty members at MIT—the center for the most important developments in computing as well as the nation’s biggest academic defense contractor—circulated a statement that started: “Misuse of scientific and technical knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind. Through its actions in Vietnam our government has shaken our confidence in its ability to make wise and humane decisions.” That declaration led directly to the founding of the Union of Concerned Scientists early the next year; the group particularly challenged the conventional wisdom on nuclear weapons and fostered debate over military funding of academic research. ³⁹ At least some scientists were beginning to question closed world visions and, indirectly, Edwards’s own work emerges out of that critical tradition.⁴⁰

Those creating the ARPANET could hardly have been unaware of these protests. Just six months before the network’s first successful connection in October 1969 between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), massive student protests focused on SRI, calling for an end to all classified, chemical warfare, and counterinsurgency research. On April 18, 1969, 8,000 students and faculty at Stanford voted to commend the protesters for “helping focus attention of the campus upon the nature of research being conducted at the University and SRI.”⁴¹ Anti-war protesters across the country repeatedly targeted closed or classified research.

In addition to those who frontally assaulted the closed world vision of the Defense establishment were those who took a less direct but still subversive approach. ARPA money supported the “hackers” at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, but some of their goals—the free sharing of information, for example—led to direct clashes. Richard Stallman, a systems programmer at the lab, carried on a guerilla war against the use of passwords on the system. The lack of security encouraged by Stallman and others caused nervousness at the Defense Department, which threatened to cut the computer off the ARPANET since anyone could walk into the lab and connect to the rest of the network.⁴²

An even more important question about the connection between closed world discourse and the Internet is how the new global network operated in practice. Edwards shows that military systems like Igloo White and SAGE did not work as planned. What, similarly, were actual workings of the ARPANET and Internet? To the biographical, bureaucratic, and ideological histories of the Internet, we need to add a social and cultural history.

Michael and Ronda Hauben’s "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet" offers a strikingly different historical narrative of the Internet—one that insists that the real story is not of the “wizards” who built the Internet but of the “Netizens” who figured out what it was “really” for and popularized it. In their populist account, ordinary users who realized that it offered a marvelous medium for democratic and interactive communication created the soul of the new network from the bottom up. And while their book is sometimes repetitive and poorly written, it offers an interpretive perspective that should be central to any future Net history.⁴³

The Haubens see the bottom-up origins of the Internet in “Usenet,” the international computer newsgroup network that has more recently been overshadowed by the World Wide Web but still has a substantial presence on the Internet—more than 30,000 different news groups covering everything from alien visitations (alt.alien.research) to Zoroastrianism (alt.religion.zoroastrianism). In 1979, two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, working with other students at nearby schools, developed some simple programs through which computers using the popular Unix operating system could call each other and exchange files. In effect, the system made possible an on-line newsletter that would be continuously updated. Those with access to any of the connected computers could read the news postings and add their own comments with the knowledge that they would be quickly read by everyone else; the same program allowed e-mail to be sent between the Unix computers connected by phone modems.

The graduate students consciously saw themselves as offering a networking alternative to the ARPANET, then still limited for reasons of cost and security to Defense Department-funded sites.⁴⁴Several months later they described Usenet as trying to “give every Unix system the opportunity to join and benefit from a computer network (a poor man’s ARPANET, if you will).” One of the graduate students, Stephen Daniel, later recalled that they had “little idea of what was really going on on the ARPANET, but we knew we were excluded.”⁴⁵The students’ insurgent computer network grew with startling speed: from the initial three sites to 150 two years later, then jumping to 5,000 by 1987. In 1988, Usenet connected 11,000 sites and participants posted about 1,800 different articles each day. Usenet grew along with the runaway popularity of Unix, which became the standard operating system for the 1980s. A crucial breakthrough had come in 1981 after Usenet won a tenuous one-way connection from the ARPANET (linked between different computers at the University of California at Berkeley). When graduate student Mark Holton established this gateway, he pierced what some disgruntled Usenet participants described as the “iron curtain” surrounding ARPANET.⁴⁶Barriers fell further two years later when the Defense Department segmented off its military communications into MILNET, which made it less nervous about what traveled over the ARPANET.

The runaway growth of Usenet as a forum for conversation and communication was paralleled by the earlier discovery of e-mail as the most popular use for ARPANET. In 1972 BBN engineer Ray Tomlinson, working on his own, developed a program for sending mail messages across the ARPANET. By the following year, three quarters of network traffic was devoted to e-mail. Almost overnight, the empty highway found its cars; to this day, e-mail remains the most popular use of the Internet.⁴⁷As with Usenet, e-mail had come from “below,” from computer users, who wanted to communicate with other computer users, rather than from ARPA directives from above. And as with Usenet, the technology had emerged from someone “hacking” around, rather than carrying out an official plan.

Much of the Haubens’s book is devoted to a somewhat hyperbolic celebration of Usenet and other computer networks as a democratic and “uncensored forum for debate” that is the “successor to other people’s presses, such as broadsides at the time of the American Revolution and the penny presses in England.” They argue that the Internet has created a new kind of citizen, the “Netizen,” who they define as “people who decide to devote time and effort into making the Net, this new part of the world, a better place”—”a regenerative and vibrant community and resource.”⁴⁸ The Haubens see the democratic nature of the network growing out of its grassroots source in the people who created Usenet.

In addition to emphasizing this later moment of creation for the Internet and locating its paternity in the person of some Duke graduate students, the Haubens also give a more democratic and grassroots spin to the earlier history of ARPANET. In particular, they stress a moment in the development of ARPANET that others have described but not necessarily in the same populist tones. This came early in 1969 when BBN convened a “Network Working Group” to devise the protocols for the new network. Steve Crocker, a bearded young UCLA graduate student, agreed to write up notes from the meetings. Crocker framed his notes to emphasize that “anyone could say anything and that nothing was official.” He labeled them “Request for Comments” and this ongoing series of “RFCs” (distributed ultimately through the medium of the network) became the way that Internet standards have evolved to this day. ⁴⁹

The Haubens, not surprisingly, celebrate the philosophy behind the RFCs as representing “unprecedented openness” that fostered the “amazing and democratic” achievement of the Net and its “cooperative culture.” They also remind us that the decision to evolve technical standards in such an open-handed way came at a particular moment in time—the 1960s. “The open environment needed to develop new technologies,” they write “is consistent with the cry for more democracy that students and others raised throughout the world during the 1960s.” Not surprisingly, the builders of the APRANET were well aware of this context. Writing in 1987 on “The Origins Of RFCs,” Crocker recalls that “the procurement of the ARPANET was initiated in the summer of 1968 — Remember Vietnam, flower children, etc?”⁵⁰ By placing the rise of the Internet within the 1960s of the counterculture and the anti-war movement, Crocker and the Haubenssuggest an alternative contextual frame to that emphasized by Edwards who puts the rise of digital computing (and implicitly the Internet) solely within the very different (but connected) sixties of the Vietnam War and the Cold War.

Both contexts are, of course, important and suggest how we might revise Edwards’s analysis to see the Internet as shaped both by the “closed world” discourse of the Cold War and by the “open world” discourse of the anti-war movement and the counterculture. Such an analysis would also incorporate the entertaining and revealing story Steve Levy tells in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy discerns among the hackers of the 1960s and 1970 (who he defines as “those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world”) a “philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost—to improve the machines, and to improve the world.” Although this “hacker ethic” was not simply the technological side of the counterculture and the antiwar movement, it drew from some of the same sources. “All over the Bay Area,” Levy writes of the early 1970s, “the engineers and programmers who loved computers and had become politicized during the anti-war movement were thinking of combining the twoactivities.” In 1972, for example, Bob Albrecht launched a tabloid called People’s Computer Company (inspired by Janis Joplin’s group, Big Brother and the Holding Company), which proclaimed on the cover of its first issue: “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people. Used to control people instead of to FREE them. Time to change all that—We need a . . . People’s Computer Company.” Among the frequent visitors to the paper’s potluck dinners was Ted Nelson, the author of the self-published manifesto of counterculture computing: Computer Lib. ⁵¹

Berkeley’s Community Memory project similarly merged the impulses of the radical sixties with the hacker ethic by setting up a time-shared mainframe computer on the second floor of a record store and opening it to free, public use as a kind of combined electronic version of a public library, coffee house, urban park, game arcade, and post office. Community Memory embodied, as Levy says, the effort to take “the Hacker Ethic to the streets” and to allow people to use computer technology “as guerilla warfare for people against bureaucracies.” Not coincidentally some aspects of Community Memory—the decentralization and the free sharing of information—sound like the Internet. And Levy argues that the ARPANET “was very much influenced by the Hacker Ethic, in that among its values was the belief that systems should be decentralized, encourage exploration, and urge a free flow of information.” ⁵²

Among the founders of Community Memory was Lee Felsenstein, a red diaper baby who had worked as an audio technician for the Free Speech Movement and spent the 1960s moving between seemingly contradictory existences as engineer and political activist. He embodied the two key groups that Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray identify as the vanguard for the personal computer revolution of the early 1970s—computer hobbyists who emerged out of the world of radio and electronics aficionados and loved the idea of building their own equipment and computer liberationists who emerged out of the New Left and the counter culture and loved the idea of bringing computers to the people. In the 1970s, Felsenstein became the moderator of the famous “Homebrew Computer Club,” where computer-hobbyists and computer-liberationists came together to create the first PCs. (When Felsenstein made a big score himself by designing the Osborne personal computer, he plowed the money into Community Memory.) Activist and counterculturist hackers like Felsenstein, in effect, tried to turn the closed world discourse on its head and make the personal computer and community networks into “supports” (to use Edwards’s term) for a discourse of freedom, decentralization, democracy, and liberation. ⁵³

Some of the computer developments of the late 1960s and the 1970s, while less directly shaped by radical politics or the counterculture, still bear the imprint of the period. Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie, the bearded and longhaired Bell Labs’ programmers who, in 1969, developed Unix, the operating system behind Usenet, later described themselves as seeking “a system around which a fellowship could form.” As Campbell-Kelly and Aspray point out, “Unix was well placed to take advantage of a mood swing in computer usage in the early 1970s caused by a growing exasperation with large, centralized mainframe computers.”⁵⁴ Protests in the 1960s had featured students wearing punch cards around their necks with the slogan “Do Not Fold, Bend, Mutilate or Spindle,” but the hostility to the large mainframe computers and centralized, batch processing extended beyond radical students to computer scientists and computer users who increasingly favored decentralized smaller computers, often running Unix. ⁵⁵ Not coincidentally, operating systems like Unix, which are not dependent on proprietary hardware and software standards, have become known among computer scientists as “open systems.”

Still, it would be a mistake to collapse the story of computers and the Internet into the story of the radical sixties, as the Haubens do sometimes. When MIT went on “strike” on March 4, 1969, most students and faculty spent the day, as usual, in their labs and classes. ⁵⁶ Moreover, many sixties radicals wanted to smash technology rather than liberate it. In 1962 the Port Huron statement had lyrically celebrated the potential of science to “constructively transform the conditions of life thro