Leonard Kleinrock's Personal History/Biography
The Birth of the Internet
Updated August 27, 1996
IMP1: The first node of the ARPANET
It all began with a comic book! At the age of 6, Leonard
Kleinrock was reading a Superman comic at his apartment in
Manhattan, when, in the centerfold, he found plans for building a
crystal radio. To do so, he needed his father's used razor
blade, a piece of pencil lead, an empty toilet paper roll, and
some wire, all of which he had no trouble obtaining. In
addition, he needed an earphone which he promptly appropriated
from a public telephone booth. The one remaining part was
something called a "variable capacitor". For this, he convinced
his mother to take him on the subway down to Canal Street, the
center for radio electronics. Upon arrival to one of the shops,
he boldly walked up to the clerk and proudly asked to purchase a
variable capacitor, whereupon the clerk replied with, "what size
do you want?". This blew his cover, and he confessed that he not
only had no idea what size, but he also had no idea what the part
was for in the first place. After explaining why he wanted one,
the clerk sold him just what he needed. Kleinrock built the
crystal radio and was totally hooked when "free" music came
through the earphones - no batteries, no power, all free! An
engineer was born.
Leonard Kleinrock spent the next few years cannibalizing
discarded radios as he sharpened his electronics skills. He went
to the legendary Bronx High School of Science and appended his
studies with courses in Radio Engineering. When the time came to
go to college, he found he could not afford to attend, even at
the tuition-free City College of New York (CCNY), and so he
enrolled in their evening session program while working full time
as an electronics technician/engineer and bringing a solid
paycheck home to his family. He graduated first in his class
after 5 1/2 years of intense work (and was elected student body
president of the evening session). His work and college training
were invaluable, and led to his winning a full graduate
fellowship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
the Electrical Engineering Department.
At MIT, he found that the vast majority of his classmates were
doing their Ph.D. research in the overpopulated area of
Information Theory. This was not for him, and instead he chose
to break new ground in the virtually unknown area of data
networks. Indeed, in 1959, he submitted a Ph.D. proposal to
study data networks, thus launching the technology which
eventually led to the Internet. He completed his work in 1962
which was later published in 1964 by McGraw-Hill as an MIT book
entitled "Communication Nets". In this work, he developed the
basic principles of packet switching, thus providing the
fundamental underpinnings for that technology. These principles
(along with his subsequent research) continue to provide a basis
for today's Internet technology. Kleinrock is arguably the
world's leading authority and researcher in the field of computer
network modeling, analysis and design and a father of the
Internet.
But the commercial world was not ready for data networks and his
work lay dormant for most of the 1960's as he continued to
publish his results on networking technology while at the same
time rising rapidly through the professorial ranks at UCLA where
he had joined the faculty in 1963. In the mid-1960's, the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) - which was created in
1958 as the United States' response to Sputnik - became
interested in networks. ARPA had been supporting a number of
computer scientists around the country and, as new researchers
were brought in, they naturally asked ARPA to provide a computer
on which they could do their research; however, ARPA reasoned
that this community of scientists would be able to share a
smaller number of computers if these computers were connected
together by means of a data network. Because of his unique
expertise in data networking, they called him to Washington to
play a key role in preparing a functional specification for the
ARPANET - a government-supported data network that would use the
technology which by then had come to be known as "packet
switching".
The specification for the ARPANET was prepared in 1968, and in
January 1969, a Cambridge-based computer company, Bolt, Beranek
and Newman (BBN) won the contract to design, implement and deploy
the ARPANET. It was their job to take the specification and
develop a computer that could act as the switching node for the
packet-switched ARPANET. BBN had selected a Honeywell
minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch.
Due to Kleinrock's fundamental role in establishing data
networking technology over the preceding decade, ARPA decided
that UCLA, under Kleinrock's leadership, would become the first
node to join the ARPANET. This meant that the first switch
(known as an Interface Message Processor - IMP) would arrive on
the Labor Day weekend, 1969, and the UCLA team of 40 people that
Kleinrock organized would have to provide the ability to connect
the first (host) computer to the IMP. This was a challenging
task since no such connection had ever been attempted. (This
minicomputer had just been released in 1968 and Honeywell
displayed it at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference where
Kleinrock saw the machine suspended by its hooks at the
conference; while running, there was this brute whacking it with
a sledge hammer just to show it was robust. Kleinrock suspects
that that particular machine is the one that was delivered by BBN
to UCLA.) As it turns out, BBN was running two weeks late (much
to Kleinrock's delight, since he and his team badly needed the
extra development time); BBN, however, shipped the IMP on an
airplane instead of on a truck, and it arrived on time. Aware of
the pending arrival date, Kleinrock and his team worked around
the clock to meet the schedule. On the day after the IMP arrived
(the Tuesday after Labor Day), the circus began - everyone who
had any imaginable excuse to be there, was there. Kleinrock and
his team were there; BBN was there; Honeywell was there (the IMP
was built out of a Honeywell minicomputer); Scientific Data
Systems was there (the UCLA host machine was an SDS machine);
AT&T long lines was there (we were attaching to their network);
GTE was there (they were the local telephone company); ARPA was
there; the UCLA Computer Science Dept. administration was there;
the UCLA campus administration was there; plus an army of
Computer Science graduate students was there. Expectations and
anxieties were high because, everyone was concerned that their
piece might fail. Fortunately, the team had done its job well
and bits began moving between the UCLA computer and the IMP that
same day. By the next day they had messages moving between the
machines. THUS WAS BORN THE ARPANET, AND THE COMMUNITY WHICH HAS
NOW BECOME THE INTERNET!
A month later the second node was added (at Stanford Research
Institute) and the first Host-to-Host message ever to be sent on
the Internet was launched from UCLA. This occurred in early
October when Kleinrock and one of his programmers proceeded to
"logon" to the SRI Host from the UCLA Host. The procedure was to
type in "log" and the system at SRI was set up to be clever
enough to fill out the rest of the command, namely to add "in"
thus creating the word "login". A telephone headset was mounted
on the programmers at both ends so they could communicate by
voice as the message was transmitted. At the UCLA end, they
typed in the "l" and asked SRI if they received it; "got the l"
came the voice reply. UCLA typed in the "o", asked if they got
it, and received "got the o". UCLA then typed in the "g" and the
darned system CRASHED! Quite a beginning. On the second
attempt, it worked fine!
Little did those pioneers realize what they had created. Indeed,
most of the ARPA-supported researchers were opposed to joining
the network for fear that it would enable outsiders to load down
their "private" computers. Kleinrock had to convince them that
joining would be a win-win situation for all concerned, and
managed to get reluctant agreement in the community. By December
1969, four sites were connected (UCLA, Stanford Research
Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah) and UCLA
was already conducting a series of extensive tests to debug the
network. Indeed, under Kleinrock's supervision, UCLA served for
many years as the ARPANET Measurement Center (in one interesting
experiment in the mid-1970's, UCLA managed to control a
geosynchronous satellite hovering over the Atlantic Ocean by
sending messages through the ARPANET from California to an East
Coast satellite dish). As head of the Center, it was Kleinrock's
mission to stress the network to its limits and, if possible,
expose its faults by "crashing" the net; in those early days,
Kleinrock could bring the net down at will, each time identifying
and repairing a serious network fault. Some of the faults he
uncovered were given descriptive names like Christmas Lockup and
Piggyback Lockup. By mid-1970, ten nodes were connected,
spanning the USA. BBN designed the IMP to accommodate no more
than 64 computers and only one network. Today, the Internet has
millions of computers and hundreds of thousands of networks!
Electronic mail (email) was an ad-hoc add-on to the network in
those early days and it immediately began to dominate network
traffic; indeed, the network was already demonstrating its most
attractive characteristic, namely, its ability to promote "people-
to-people" interaction. The ARPANET evolved into the Internet in
the 1980's and was discovered by the commercial world in the late
`80's; today, the majority of the traffic on the Internet is from
the commercial sector, whereas it had earlier been dominated by
the scientific research community. Indeed, no one in those early
days predicted how enormously successful data networking would
become.
In the ensuing years since those pioneering days that led to the
birth of the Internet, Kleinrock has continued as a prime mover
at the frontier of the Internet and its growth and development.
He has provided an international brain trust of Ph.D. graduates
(39 to date) who populate major laboratories, universities and
commercial organizations and who continue to advance the state of
the art in networking. As one of the youngest members elected to
the National Academy of Engineering, he was a founding member of
the National Research Council's elite Computer Science and
Telecommunications Board (CSTB). He chaired the committee that
produced this Board's first report, "Towards a National Research
Network"; in presenting the findings of this landmark report, he
testified for then Senator Al Gore, which precipitated the
Gigabit Networking component of the US Government's High
Performance Computing and Communications Initiative.
Today, four events have juxtaposed to create a crucial juncture.
First, the Internet has exploded in use and reach (and no one
controls the Internet, no one owns it, no one can "shut it off").
Second, the US Administration has vigorously promoted a vision of
the Information Superhighway (the National Information
Infrastructure - NII). Third, the entertainment industry, along
with the telephone and cable TV industries, have recognized that
there is a massive business opportunity in network-based
entertainment. Fourth, the telecommunications networks have been
deregulated. Indeed, the Internet and the World Wide Web are
household words. The result is that huge sums of money are about
to be expended by the private sector to wire up the USA. In the
face of this, there are some basic questions as to what is the
proper vision of future networking, what is the technology
framework needed to realize that vision, who will design and
deploy it, whom will it serve and how, what kinds of applications
and services will it support, what is the role of government and
of the private sector, etc. Once again, Leonard Kleinrock is
leading the effort here by way of a National Research Council
CSTB committee that he chaired, and that produced the widely
circulated 1994 report "Realizing the Information Future; The
Internet and Beyond". This report took the country by storm,
and he briefed many government and industry groups regarding its
recommendations. Kleinrock's goal this time is to help formulate
the guidance needed to bring the networking technology that he
pioneered to society and industry for the greater good of this
country and of the world.
More recently, Kleinrock has taken the leading role in the new
technology of Nomadic Computing and Communications; the idea is
to create a technology that will support the nomadic user in his
computing and communication needs as he travels from place to
place.
The potential impact of a ubiquitous information infrastructure
is unbounded. The nature of the services and styles it can
produce is limited only by the imagination of its practitioners.
Kleinrock has always worked at the frontier of new technology.
He chooses not to follow, fill-in, patch-up or catch-up. Rather,
he takes the lead and opens up vast new technologies that have
impact and excitement. Kleinrock has provided the leadership and
vision to help bring this about .
From a comic book to cyberspace; an interesting journey indeed!
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