From ARPANET to Usenet News: On the Nourishment of the Net Commonwealth By Ronda Hauben "The Nutrition of a Commonwealth consisteth, in the Plenty, and the Distribution of Materials, Condusive to Life." Thomas Hobbes The Leviathan "The method I take...is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative words, and intellectual arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Conservation of others." Sir William Petty, "Political Arithmetic" Preface In the 1600s Sir William Petty, who has been called the father of Scientific Economics, pioneered the development of what he called "Political Arithmetic." Political Arithmetic was the application of the scientific method elaborated by Sir Francis Bacon and others of the 16th and 17th centuries to the problems of the economy of a nation. Political Arithmetic involved the gathering of data distinguished by Number, Weight, or Measure to determine the factors which contribute to the material well being of the people of a society and those which were the impediments to the production of social wealth. Petty only considered those causes which "have a visible Foundation in Nature" and discarded those that were dependent on "the mutable minds, opinions, appetites, and passions of particular men."(1) The creation of a Global Computer Network is one of the surprising developments of our times. Applying the method of Political Arithmetic to this achievement raises the ques- tion: What are the factors that nourished the growth and development of this network and what are the impediments to its continued development and expansion? Introduction There is an international computer network that spans the globe and connects universities, researchers and computer users around the world.(2) Twenty-five years ago, this development was nonexistent. This is "the largest machine that man has ever constructed, the international global network."(3) This computer network links millions of people around the world, yet others who are not participants in this exciting new global computer community know little of its existence. The global network is accomplished by, and makes possible, a high degree of automation. The creation of this network demonstrates that our society has the potential to provide for more of the needs of people with comparatively less labor than ever before. One of the most important examples of the promise of this new technology is the creation and expansion of a users news network called Usenet News. Usenet reaches over six million people worldwide with over 4,500 different newsgroup subjects and gigabytes of articles per day. This news uses no paper, no glue, no postage. Yet, this technology makes it possible for the users them- selves to determine and provide for the content and range of information that is conveyed via this new news medium.(4) It also makes possible the rapid response and discussion of articles posted and provides a forum where issues can be freely debated and information exchanged. This news provides for the information exchange and learning needed by system administrators, programmers, engineers, scientists, and users in their daily work. In turn, they contribute to the network's development. The continuing growth of Usenet News is a tribute to the pioneers who have developed this new technology of computer automation. J.C.R. Licklider was one of these early network pioneers. His vision of an Intergalactic Computer Network helped to inspire these developments. He and Albert Vezza, describing an earlier network advance, wrote, "Shakespeare could have been foreseeing the present situation in information net- working when he said, `...What's past is prologue; what's to come, in yours and my discharge'."(5) The story of the network's growth and development contains important lessons for its continued expansion. The development of this inter- national network, linking millions of people around the world, now stands at a turning point. Will it continue to go forward or will it be detoured? An understanding of the environment and policies that nourished the development of the network provides a scientific foundation on which to base its further expansion. Such an understanding will also make it possible to continue to contribute to the Net Com- monwealth that has evolved through these policies. Part I The Development of the ARPANET In 1962, the report "On Distributed Communications Networks" by Paul Baran, was published by the Rand Corporation.(6) Baran's research, done under a standing contract from the U.S. Air Force, discussed how the U.S. military could protect its communications systems from serious attack. Baran outlined the principle of "redundancy of connectivity" and explored various models of forming communications systems and evaluating their vulnerability. The report proposed a communications system where there would be no obvious central command and control point, but all surviving points would be able to reestablish contact in the event of an attack on any one point. Thus damage to a part would not destroy the whole and its effect on the whole would be minimized. One of his recommendations was for a national public utility to transport computer data, much in the way the telephone system transports voice data. "Is it time now to start thinking about a new and possibly non-existent public utility," Baran asked, "a common user digital data communication plant designed specifically for the transmission of digital data among a large set of subscribers?"(7) He cautioned against limiting the choice of technology to create such a network to that which was currently in use. He proposed that a packet switching, store and forward technology be developed for a data network. He wrote 11 reports which were the "first published description of what we now call packet switching."(8) At least one of these was classified and the rest were not widely circulated among the scientific and academic community. Another networking pioneer, Donald W. Davies, of the United Kingdom, also did important work in this field and has been credited with introducing the term "packet" switching. Other researchers were interested in computers and com- munications, particularly in the computer as a communication device. J.C.R. Licklider was one of the most influential. He was particularly interested in the man-computer communication relationship. "Lick", as he asked people to call him, wondered how the computer could help humans to think and to solve problems. In the article, "Man Computer Symbiosis", he explored how the computer could help humans to do intellectual work. Lick was also interested in the question of how the computer could help humans to communicate better.(9) "In a few years men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," Licklider and Robert Taylor wrote, "When minds interact, new ideas emerge." Pioneers like Paul Baran and J.C.R. Licklider were pro- posing the development of computer technology in ways that hadn't been developed before. While Baran's work was known mainly in military circles, Licklider had access to such military research and writing, but was also involved in the academic computer science research and education community. Larry Roberts, another of the pioneers of network research, was influenced by Lick's vision of an Intergalactic Computer Network to change his life and career. Lick's contribution, Roberts explains, represented the effort to "define the problems and benefits resulting from computer networking."(10) After informal conversations with Licklider, Fernando Corbato and Alan Perlis, at the Second Congress on Information System Sciences in Hot Springs, Virginia, in November 1964, Larry Roberts "concluded that the most important problem in the computer field before us at the time was computer networking; the ability to access one computer from another easily and economically to permit resource sharing," Roberts recalled, "That was a topic in which Licklider was very interested and his enthusiasm infected me."(11) During the early 1960s the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) under its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established two new funding offices, the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) and another for behavioral science. From 1962-64, Licklider took a leave from his work at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, (BBN) to give guidance to these two newly created offices. In reviewing this seminal period, Alan Perlis recalled how Lick's philosophy guided ARPA's funding of computer science research. Perlis explained, "I think that we all should be grateful to ARPA for not focusing on very specific projects such as workstations. There was no order issued that said, `We want a proposal on a workstation.' Goodness knows, they would have gotten many of them. Instead, I think that ARPA, through Lick, realized that if you get `n' good people together to do research on computing, you're going to illuminate some reasonable fraction of the ways of proceeding because the computer is such a general instrument." In retrospect Perlis explained, "We owe a great deal to ARPA for not circumscribing directions that people took in those days. I like to believe that the purpose of the military is to support ARPA, and the purpose of ARPA is to support research."(12) Licklider confirmed that he was guided in his philosophy by the rationale that a broad investigation of a problem was necessary in order to solve that problem. He explained, "There's a lot of reason for adopting a broad delimitation rather than a narrow one because if you're trying to find out where ideas come from, you don't want to isolate yourself from the areas that they come from."(13) Licklider attracted others involved in computer research to his vision that computer networking was the most important challenge. In 1966-67 MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA and System Development Corp. (SDC), in Santa Monica, California, got a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to begin research on linking computers across the continent. Larry Roberts, describing this work, explained, "Convinced that it was a worthwhile goal, we set up a test network to see where the problems would be. Since computer time sharing experiments at MIT, (CTSS [Compatible Time Sharing System -ed]) and Dartmouth, (DTSS [Dartmouth Time Sharing System -ed]) had demonstrated that it was possible to link different computer users to a single computer, the cross country experiment built on this advance." (i.e. once timesharing was possible, the linking of remote computers was also possible.)(14) Roberts reported that there was no trouble linking dissimilar computers (the TX-2 computer at Lincoln Laboratory in Massachusetts and the Q-32 computer at SDC in California). The problems, he claimed, were with the telephone lines across the continent, that the throughput was inadequate to accomplish their goals. Thus their experiment set the basis for justifying research in setting up a nationwide store and forward, packet switching data network. During this period, ARPA was funding computer research at several U.S. universities and research laboratories. The decision was made to include these research contractors in an experimental network the ARPANET. A plan was created for a working network to link 16 research groups together. This plan for the ARPANET was made available at the October 1967 ACM Symposium on Operating Principles in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.(15) Shortly thereafter, Larry Roberts was recruited to head the IPTO office at ARPA to guide the research. A Request for Proposal (RFP) set out specifications for the project and asked for bids. Proposals were invited to create an opera- tional network at four sites and to provide a design for a network that could include 17 sites. The award for the contract went to Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, MA. in January, 1969. The planned network would make use of mini-computers to serve as switching nodes for the host computers at four sites that were to be connected to the network. The Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputers were chosen for the network of interface message processors (IMPs) that would be linked to each other. At first, each of the IMPs (i.e. nodes) would be linked to one host computer. These IMPs were configured with 12K 16-bit words of memory though they were among the most powerful minicomputers available at the time. The opening stanzas of a poem by Vint Cerf, an ARPANET pioneer, describe these early days of networking(16): Like distant islands sundered by the sea, We had no sense of one community. We lived and worked apart and rarely knew That others searched with us for knowledge, too. Distant ARPA spurred us in our quest And for our part we worked and put to test New thoughts and theories of computing art; We deemed it science not, but made a start. Each time a new machine was built and sold, We'd add it to our list of needs and told Our source of funds "Alas! Our knowledge loom Will halt 'til it's in our computer room. But, could these new resources not be shared? Let links be built; machines and men be paired! Let distance be no barrier! They set That goal: design and build the ARPANET! On August 30, 1969, the first IMP arrived at the Univer- sity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) which was to be the first site of the new network. It was connected to the SDS Sigma 7 computer at UCLA. Shortly thereafter IMPs were delivered to the other three sites in this initial testbed network. At Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the IMP was connected to an XDS-940 computer. At the University of Cali- fornia, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the IMP was connected to an IBM 360/75. And at the University of Utah (Utah), the fourth site, the IMP was connected to a DEC PDP-10. By the end of 1969, the first four IMPs had been connected to the host computers at their individual sites and the network connections between the IMPs were operational. The researchers and scientists involved could begin to identify the problems they had to solve to develop a working network where there would be communication from host to host. There were programming and technical problems to be solved so the different computers would be able to communi- cate with each other. Also, there was a need for an agreed upon set of signals that would open up communication chan- nels, allow data to pass through, and then would close the channels. These agreed upon standards were called proto- cols. The initial proposal for the ARPANET required that the sites work together to establish the necessary protocols. Beginning in 1968, meetings of a group to discuss establish- ing these protocols took place. (17) In 1969, the group which called itself the Network Working Group (NWG) began to put together a set of documents that would be available to everyone involved for consideration and discussion. They called these documents Requests For Comment, (RFC) and RFC 1, dated April, 1969, was mailed to the participants.(18) As the problems of setting up the four computer network were identified and solved, the network was expanded to several more sites.(19) By April 1971, there were 15 nodes and 23 hosts in the network. The earliest sites attached to the network were connected to Honeywell DDP-516 IMPs.(20) These sites were: 1 UCLA 2 SRI 3 UCSB 4 U. of UTAH 5 BBN 6 MIT 7 RAND Corp 8 SDC 9 Harvard 10 Lincoln Lab 11 Stanford 12 U. of Illinois, Urbana 13 Case Western Reserve U. 14 Carnegie Mellon U. (CMU) 15 NASA-AMES Then a smaller minicomputer, the Honeywell 316, was util- ized. It was compatible with the DDP-516 IMP but was avail- able at half the cost. Some nodes were configured as TIPs (i.e., Terminal IMPs) beginning with: 16 NASA-AMES TIP 17 MITRE TIP By January 1973, there were 35 nodes of which 14 were TIPs including a satellite link which connected California with a TIP in Hawaii. With the rapid increase of network traffic, problems were discovered with the reliability of the subnet and correc- tions had to be worked on. In mid 1973, Norway and England were added to the Net by a low speed line, adding to the problems to be solved. By September 1973, there were 40 nodes and 45 hosts on the network. And the traffic had expanded from 1 million packets per day in 1972 to 2.9 mil- lion packets per day by September, 1973. By 1977, there were 111 host computers connected via the ARPANET. By 1983 there were 4,000.(21) As the network was put into operation, the researchers learned which of their original assumptions and models were inaccurate. For example, BBN describes how they had initially not anticipated that the IMPs would need to do error checking of the IMP/host interface. They explain: "The first four IMPs were developed and installed on schedule by the end of 1969. No sooner were these IMPs in the field than it became clear that some provision was needed to connect hosts relatively distant from an IMP (i.e., up to 2,000 feet instead of the expected 50 feet). Thus, in early 1970 a `distant' IMP/host interface was developed. Augmented simply by heftier line drivers, these distant interfaces made clear, for the first time, the fallacy in the assumption that had been made that no error control was needed on the host/IMP interface because there would be no errors on such a local connection."(22) The expanding operational network made it possible to uncover the actual bugs. In describing the importance of an operational network to the research efforts, as opposed to being limited to a laboratory model, Alex McKenzie and David Walden, in their article "ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and Internet"(23) write: "Errors in coding control were another problem. However carefully one designs, codes, and performs quality control, errors can still slip through. Fortunately, with a large number of IMPs in the network, most of these errors are found quickly because they occur so frequently. For instance, a bug in an IMP code that occurs once a day in one IMP, occurs every 15 min in a 100-IMP net- work. Unfortunately, some bugs still will remain. If a symp- tom of a bug is detected somewhere in a 100-IMP network once a week (often enough to be a problem), then it will happen only once every 2 years in a single IMP in a development lab for a programmer trying to find the source of the symptom. Thus, achieving a totally bug-free network is very diffi- cult." In October 1972, the First International Conference on Computer Communications was held in Washington, D.C. A public demonstration of the ARPANET was given setting up an actual node with 40 terminals. Representatives from projects around the world including Canada, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain and the U.S. discussed the need to begin work on establishing agreed upon protocols. The InterNetwork Working Group (INWG) was created to begin discussions for a common protocol and Vinton Cerf, who was involved with UCLA ARPANET, was chosen as the first chairman. The vision proposed for the international interconnection of networks was "a mesh of independent, autonomous networks interconnected by gateways, just as independent circuits of ARPANET are interconnected by IMPs."(24) The network continued to grow and expand. In 1975 the ARPANET was transferred to the control of the Defense Communications Agency (DAC). Evaluating the success of ARPANET research, Licklider recalled that he felt ARPA had been run by an enlightened set of military men while he was involved with it. "I don't want to brag about ARPA," he explains, "It is in my view, however, a very enlightened place. It was fun to work there. I think I never encountered brighter, more creative people, than the inhabitants of the third floor E-ring of the Pentagon. But that, I'll say, was a long time ago, and I simply don't know how bright and likeable they are now. But ARPA didn't constrain me much."(25) The following description of the exciting research environment of the early ARPANET, was posted on Usenet News by Eugene Miya, who had been a student at one of the early ARPA sites. He wrote: "It was an effort to connect different kinds of computers back when a school or company had only one (that's 1) computer. The first configuration of the ARPANET had only 4 computers, I had luckily selected a school at one of those 4 sites: UCLA/Rand Corp, UCSB (us), SRI, and the U of Utah. "Who? The U.S. DOD: Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA was the sugar daddy of computer science. Some very bright people were given some money, freedom, and had a lot of vision. It not only started computer networks, but also computer graphics, computer flight simulation, head mounted displays, parallel processing, queuing models, VLSI, and a host of other ideas. Far from being evil warmongers, some neat work was done. "Why? Lots of reasons: intellectual curiosity, the need to have different machines communicate, study fault toler- ance of communications systems in the event of nuclear war, share and connect expensive resources, very soft ideas to very hard ideas.... "I first saw the term "internetwork" in a paper from Xerox PARC (another ARPANET host). The issue was one of interconnecting Ethernets (which had the 256 [slightly less] host limitation). Schoch's CACM worm program paper is a good one. I learned much of this with the help of the NIC (Network Information Center). This does not mean the Internet is like this today. I think the early ARPANET was kind of a wondrous neat place, sort of a golden era. You could get into other people's machines with a minimum of hassle (someone else paid the bills). No more...." He continued: "Where did I fit in? I was a frosh nuclear engineering major, spending odd hours (2 a.m. - 4 a.m., sometimes on Fridays and weekends) doing hackerish things rather than doing student things: studying or dating, etc. I put together an interactive SPSS and learned a lot playing chess on an MIT[-MC] DEC-10 from an IBM-360. Think of the problems: 32-bit versus 36-bit, different character set [remember I started with EBCDIC], FTP then is largely FTP now, has changed very little. We didn't have text editors available to students on the IBM (yes you could use the ARPANET via punched card decks). Learned a lot. I wish I had hacked more."(26) One of the surprising developments to the researchers of the ARPANET was the great popularity of electronic mail. Analyzing the reasons for this unanticipated benefit from their Arpanet research, Licklider and Vezza wrote: "By the fall of 1973, the great effectiveness and convenience of such fast, informed messages services... had been discovered by almost everyone who had worked on the development of the ARPANET -- and especially by the then Director of ARPA, S.J. Lukasik, who soon had most of his office directors and program managers communicating with him and with their colleagues and their contractors via the network. Thereafter, both the number of (intercommunicating) electronic mail systems and the number of users of them on the ARPANET increased rapidly."(27) "One of the advantages of the message system over letter mail," they added, "was that, in an ARPANET message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly, even to an older person in a superior position and even to a person one did not know very well, and the recipient took no offense. The formality and perfection that most people expect in a typed letter did not become associated with network messages, probably because the network was so much faster, so much more like the telephone.... Among the advantages of the net- work message services over the telephone were the fact that one could proceed immediately to the point without having to engage in small talk first, that the message services pro- duced a preservable record, and that the sender and receiver did not have to be available at the same time."(28) Describing the important development represented by e-mail, the authors of the Completion Report (1978) wrote: "The largest single surprise of the ARPANET program has been the incredible popularity and success of network mail. There is little doubt that the techniques of network mail developed in connection with the ARPANET program are going to sweep the country and drastically change the techniques used for intercommunication in the public and private sectors."(29) Not only was the network used to see what the actual problems would be, the communication it made possible gave the researchers the ability to collaborate to deal with these problems. Summarizing the important breakthrough represented by the ARPANET, the authors of the Completion Report conclude: "This ARPA program has created no less than a revolution in computer technology and has been one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by ARPA. The program has initiated extensive changes in the Defense Department's use of comput- ers as well as in the use of computers by the entire public and private sectors, both in the United States and around the world. "Just as the telephone, the telegraph, and the printing press had far-reaching effects on human intercommunication, the widespread utilization of computer networks which has been catalyzed by the ARPANET project represents a similarly far-reaching change in the use of computers by mankind. The full impact of the technical changes set in motion by this project may not be understood for many years."(30) Notes for Part I (1)The Writings of Sir William Petty, ed Hull, London, 1899, reprint edition Augustus Kelley Publishers, N.Y., p. 244. (2)"Internet Society News," vol 1, no. 2, Spring, 1992, back inside cover. (3)Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies Without Boundaries, Cambridge, 1990, p. 56. (4)See for example, Michael Hauben, "Social Forces Behind the Development of Usenet News," The Amateur Computerist, vol 5, no. 1-2. (5)"Applications of Information Network", Proceedings of the IEEE, vol 66, No. 11, November, 1978, p. 57. (6)Baran, September, 1962, p. 2. (Correspondence from Willis Ware of Rand Corp. indicated that this report was created under a standing contract.) (7)Ibid., p. 40. P. Baran et al, See also "On Distributed Communications," Vols I through XI, RAND Corporation Memos, August, 1964. (See also description by Larry Roberts, "The ARPANET and Computer Networks" reprinted in A History of Personal Workstations, ed by Adele Goldberg, N.Y. 1988, 147.) (8)See "The Evolution of Packet Switching," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol 66, Number 11, November, 1978, p. 266-7. See also "The Arpanet and Computer Networks," in "A History of Personal Workstations," p. 143. (9)See "Man Computer Symbiosis" and "The Computer as a Communication device" in "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider 1915-1990", p. 21. (10)See "The ARPANET and Computer Networks" reprinted in A History of Personal Workstations, ed by Adele Goldberg, N.Y. 1988, p. 143. (11)Ibid., pp. 143-144. See also "The ARPANET and Computer Networks," (12)Workstations, Ibid., p. 129. (13)"Some Reflections on Early History," Workstations, p. 118. Licklider also commented on how people who were opposed to Defense research during the 1960s wrote proposals for research to ARPA to spend money on something other than airplane carriers. See p. 130. (14)See, for example, "Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers," by Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts, Proceedings - FJCC, 1966, p. 426. (15)Roberts, Workstations, p. 146. Describing ARPA's decision to build a network to connect the computer science and research contractors as the plan for the ARPANET, Roberts writes: "These projects and their computers provided an ideal environment for an experimental network project; consequently the ARPANET was planned during 1967 with the aid of these researchers to link these project's computers together. One task was to develop a computer interface pro- tocol acceptable to all 16 research groups. A second task was to design a new communications technology to support 35 computers at 16 sites with 500,000 packets/day traffic. The initial plan for the ARPANET was published in October 1967 at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles in Gatlinburg Tennessee." (pp. 145-146) Also, Roberts describes the network design for the ARPANET. He writes, "The communi- cations network design was that of the now conventional packet network; interface message processors (IMPs) at each node interconnected by leased telecommunication lines pro- viding a store and forward service on very short messages." (p. 146) (16)From "Requiem for the ARPANET" by Vinton G. Cerf, Users' Dictionary of Computer Networks, Bedford, MA, 1989. (17)A description of the beginning of the Network Working Group, "The Origins of RFCs" by Stephen D. Crocker, is con- tained in RFC 1000 by J. Reynolds and J. Postel. (18)See Completion Report, by F. Heart, A. McKenzie, J. McQuillian, and D. Walden, BBN Report 4799, January 4, 1978, pp. III 46-48. (19)Ibid. (20)List of sites based on a posting on Usenet by Joel Levin on Oct. 17, 1990. The Completion Report confirms these sites, but names Burroughs as one of the first 15 sites. (21)See Completion Report and "ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and Internet" in the Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, vol 1. (22) Completion Report, p. III-55. (23)See Completion Report and "ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and Internet" in the Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, vol 1, p. 361. (24)Ibid. pp. 361-2. (25)Workstations, p. 126. (26)From Eugene Miya in alt.folklore.computers, comp.misc, Re: Internet: The origins, Oct 16 1990. (27)"Applications", p. 44. (28)Ibid. (29)Completion Report, pp. III 113-116. (30)Ibid., p. I-2. Thanks to Harvey Lynn of Rand Corp. and Alex McKenzie of BBN for making important materials available. Part II-The Development of Usenet News: The Poor Man's Arpanet The Arpanet provided an exciting experimental environment for those who had access to U.S. Department of Defense contracts. Many of the computer science community, however, did not have such access, but also wanted to be part of an online community. Graduate students in computer science helped to broaden access to the wonders of the Arpanet by creating Usenet News, which they originally referred to as "The Poor Man's Arpanet." Usenet News was born in 1979 when Tom Truscott, and Jim Ellis, graduate students at Duke University and Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, conceived of a network to link the computers at their different schools together. Using homemade 300 baud auto dial modems, the unix to unix copy program (uucp) that was being distributed with the UNIX operating system, version 7, and the unix news program, Steve Bellovin, one of the students, wrote some simple unix shell scripts to have the computers automatically call each other up, search for changes in the files, and then copy the changes. While email and mailing lists had been common in the Arpanet, Gregory G. Woodbury, a Usenet pioneer at Duke during these early years of NetNews, describes how "News allowed all interested persons to read the discussion, and to (relatively) easily inject a comment and to make sure that all participants saw it." (1)"The `genius' of the netnews," he explains, "was to see that the shell, the find command, and UUCP would allow categorized news discussions to be shared between machines that were only connected by a serial line. Unfortunately," Woodbury regrets, "I don't recall who had this flash of insight, and the 5 folk honored by the EFF formed the core of folks who developed the idea into a real working system. (Editor's Note: The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave an award to Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis and cited Steve Bellovin, Stephen Daniel and Dennis Rockwell for their creation of Usenet at its 1993 awards ceremonies.) Soon three computer sites, duke, unc and phs (i.e. at Duke, at the University of North Carolina, and at the Physiology Department of the Duke Medical School) were hooked together and a simple program was running connecting the three. Woodbury explains that Dennis Rockwell, a graduate student in computer science at Duke, had gotten a Systems Programmer job for the Physiology Department at the Medical School. When Physiology decided to use unix for the project that Rockwell was working on, "then it was a matter of convenience to have a hardwired circuit between the two machines for moving programs back and forth (between CS and Physiology." And since Rockwell, "migrated back and forth between Physiology and CS, he was instrumental in getting the connection to `phs' implemented," Woodbury recalls, "so that he didn't have to spend his working time across the street at CS." Woodbury describes how the NetNews program that was created using unix shell scripts was slow. "It ran for awhile," he explains, "until the impact it made on system performance (very heavy load :-) got in the way of one of the professor's numerical simulation runs. Other department computer users became annoyed when NetNews tied up the Department computer." To deal with the problem, Stephen Daniel, a graduate student in Computer Science, offered to rewrite the program in C and he, along with Tom Truscott, wrote the first C version of NetNews which was known as A News. In January of 1980, Jim Ellis presented a talk at the Unix users association for technical and academic users called Usenix. He tells how many of the 400 people at the conference came to hear his talk describing the NetNews uucp program. The invitation Ellis handed out at the January 1980 conference explained: "The initially most significant service will be to provide a rapid access newsletter. Any node can submit an article, which will in due course propagate to all nodes. A `news' program has been designed which can perform this service. The first articles will probably concern bug fixes, trouble reports, and general cries for help. Certain categories of news, such as `have/want' articles, may become sufficiently popular as to warrant separate newsgroups. (The news program mentioned above supports newsgroups.) "The mail command provides a convenient means for responding to intriguing articles. In general, small groups of users with common interests will use mail to communicate. If the group size grows sufficiently, they will probably start an additional news group... "It is hoped that USENIX will take an active (indeed central) role in the network. There is the problem of members not on the net, so hardware newsletters should remain the standard communication method. However, use of the net for preparation of newsletters seems like a good idea."(2) In the tradition of gaining knowledge from the testing of networking theory via the Arpanet, the pioneers of Usenet invited others to participate in the network and then to work out the problems that developed. Their Invitation urged: "This is a sloppy proposal. Let's start a committee. No thanks! Yes, there are problems. Several amateurs collaborated on this plan. But let's get started now. Once the net is in place, we can start a committee. And they will actually use the net, so they will know what the real problems are." Several months later, the software for the A News program for Usenet News was put on the conference tape for general distribution at the Delaware Summer 1980 Usenix meeting. The handout distributed at this conference explained: "A goal of USENET has been 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 students, Stephen Daniel, explains why the term "poor man's ARPANET" was used. "I don't remember when the phrase was coined," Daniel explains, but to me it expressed exactly what was going on. We (or at least I) had little idea of what was really going on on the Arpanet, but we knew we were excluded. Even if we had been allowed to join, there was no way of coming up with the money. It was commonly accepted at the time that to join the Arpanet took political connections and $100,000. I don't know if that assumption was true, but we were so far from having either connections or $$ that we didn't even try. The `Poor man's Arpanet' was our way of joining the CS community (Computer Science -ed), and we made a deliberate attempt to extend it to other not-well-endowed members of the community. It is hard to believe in retrospect," he writes, "but we were initially disappointed at how few people joined us. We attributed this lack more to the cost of autodialers than lack of desire."(4) Unlike the Arpanet, Usenet News was available to all who were interested as long as they had access to the Unix operating system (which in those days was available at a very minimal cost to the academic community.) And posting and participating in the network was available at no cost besides what the colleges paid for equipment and the telephone calls to receive or send NetNews. Therefore, the joys and challenges of being a participant in the creation of an ever expanding network, the experience available to an exclusive few via the Arpanet, was available via Usenet News to those without political or financial connections -- to the commonfolk of the computer science community. As Daniel notes, Usenet pioneers report that they were surprised at how slowly Usenet sites expanded at first. But when the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) joined Usenet, links began to be created between Usenet and the Arpanet. University of California at Berkeley was a site on the Arpanet. At first, it is reported, mailing lists of discussions among Arpanauts (as they were called by Usenet users) were poured into Usenet. Also by 1979-80, UCB was under contract to ARPA to provide a version of Unix (Berkeley Systems Distribution) for the ARPA contractors that were going to be upgraded to VAX computers. This first connection between the Arpanet and Usenet News, Daniels reports, only contributed to "the sense of being poor cousins." Daniel explains: "It was initially very hard to contribute to those lists, and when you did you were more likely to get a response to your return address than to the content of your letter. It definitely felt second class to be in read-only mode on human-nets and sf-lovers. (Those were two popular Arpanet mailing lists. Mailing lists are a way of having all the people who wanted to be part of a discussion receive all the mail that any person emails to the list -ed) Daniel clarifies the different philosophy guiding the development of Usenet as opposed to that of the Arpanet. He explains, "Usenet was organized around netnews, where the receiver controls what is received. The Arpanet lists were organized around mailing lists, where there is a central control for each list that potentially controls who receives the material and what material can be transmitted. I still strongly prefer the reader-centered view," he concludes. With the increasing connections to the Arpanet from Usenet, the numbers of sites on Usenet grew. A map from April 1981 shows the number of different sites on Usenet during this early period. USENET as of April 5, 1981(5) reed phs \ / \ decvax---duke----unc | / \ | mhtsa--research mh135a ucbopt---+ | | \ | | | | eagle ihnss vax135 ucbcory--\ | | | / / >----ucbvax------+-------+-------------\ ucbarpa--/ | | | \ | sdcarl sdcsvax menlo70--hao ucsfcgl ucbonyx--+ \ / | phonlab sytek While the Arpanet made possible electronic mail and discussion groups via electronic mail (i.e. mailing lists), Usenet made it possible for participants to post any message they wanted and it could be seen by everyone. Pioneers from the early days of Usenet point out that originally there were a fair number of people who read all the posts. However, as Usenet started to grow there were different newsgroups that got set up and they were grouped by subject area, and the number of articles became too large for any individual to read them all. Subject areas on Usenet range from rec.autos to sci.econ. There are many computer related groups. Originally, the creators of Usenet felt that most of the posts would be related to UNIX problems and bugs. But early on there was a broad range of discussion.(6) Often there have been problems that have developed in Usenet. The system administrators and others discuss the problem and sometimes what is called a flame war develops where people argue out their differences online. The network has proven especially valuable in helping system administrators and programmers deal with the problems they run into with their work and researchers using the network have found the collaborative work it makes possible very exciting. Usenet now reaches 3-6 million people and has more than 3,500 newsgroups. And the number of both is always growing. It has been made possible by the cooperative work of the participants and the programming tools of UNIX and C that were created by the research programmers at Bell Labs and added to by programmers and users around the world. Writing their programs using UNIX and C, participants in the UNIX community have written the A, B and C News and INN versions of Netnews which have made it possible for Usenet to accommodate an ever expanding number of kilobytes of news from an ever expanding number of computer users. Also other programmers have contributed their time and labor to create newsreaders, mail programs and other software needed for the ever growing community of people participating in Usenet News. (7) After the original porting of the Arpanet mailing lists to Usenet, connections with the Arpanet increased. Eventually, Usenet traffic was allowed to go through the Arpanet. Steve Bellovin describes how the early porting of Mailing Lists like Human Nets and SciFi Lovers onto Usenet was a force to broaden access to Arpanet. He explains: "The first gateway of Arpanet mailing lists to Usenet was an early force to have gateways within Arpanet. Gateways to the Arpanet were on the side things and in all likelihood not officially sanctioned. However, this provided the impetus for gatesways into Arpanet. This was the pressure on the Arpanet to provide service to a larger number of people -- a first step to transform the Arpanet to become a part of the backbone of the Internet."(8) In 1987, the U.S. government set up the NSFNet under pressure from academic scientists and computer scientists to provide additional access to the developing network. The NSFNet replaced the Arpanet as the backbone for the Internet and the Arpanet was decommissioned in 1989.(9) In its early years, Usenet was mainly transported via uucp using the telephone lines. A protocol was later created for Usenet to make it possible for it to ride on the Arpanet and then the NSFNet and along the Internet, and thus cut down on phone costs for transporting it. Following are some statistics that have been gathered of Usenet growth: 1979 3 sites ~2 articles a day 1980 15 sites, ~10 articles a day 1981 150 sites, ~20 articles a day 1982 400 sites, ~50 articles a day 1983 600 sites, ~120 1984 900 sites, ~225 1985 1,300 sites, ~375 articles per day, 1+Megabyte per/day 1986 2,500 sites, ~500, 2MB+ 1987 5,000 sites,~1000, 2.5MB+ 1988 11,000 sites,~1800, 4MB+ USENET sites posted about 26,000 articles per day to 4902 groups for 65 total megabytes (52 without headers) over the two week period before 8 March, 1993.(10) Usenet has continued to grow and there are times that it seemed it would break under its ever increasing expansion. (This concern began to be referred to as `The imminent death of the net is predicted' and became a source of net folklore.) During such difficult period, mailing lists have been set up to discuss the problems. In one such discussion group, several of the participants put forward plans for a substantial change in Usenet, while other participants urged that it was crucial to first figure out the exact nature of the problem, if one wants a solution to that problem.(11) Summary - Royal Society of London as Scientific Perspective The early 1600's, like contemporary times, was a period in Britain when new forms and methods of production were becoming possible. An attitude of respect for data that comes from the physical world and observations based on that data had been developing in Britain and on the Continent (especially in Italy.) Interested in putting into practice the scientific method and principles that had been developed by Sir Francis Bacon, and in applying their science to serve the well being of the British people, a group of amateur scientists began to gather. Meeting in each other's homes and then in Gresham College in London, they formed what came to be known as the Invisible College. They met on Wednesdays and conducted experiments in different areas of production and science. The following stanzas are from a ballad of the period describing their activities: "If to be rich, and to be learned Be every nations chiefest glory, How much are Englishmen concerned Gresham to celebrate in story Who built th' Exchange to enrich the Citty And Colledge founded the Witty" "A second hath described at full The Philosophy of making Cloth Tells you, what Grass doth make course Wooll And what it is that breeds the Moth Great learning is 'ith art of Clothing Though vulgar People think it nothing.(12) The experiments conducted by these amateur scientists and the understanding of the laws of how the physical world operated generated from their experiments, led to a significant increase in the ability of British industry to modernize its methods of production. This breakthrough made possible the industrial revolution.(13) This same need for an experiential basis for knowledge and for a broadness of knowledge and honesty about problems was understood by the researchers who worked on the Arpanet. A similar attitude nourished the birth and early development of UNIX and the network that was born and grew up as the child of the UNIX community, Usenet News. Putting one's theories and models into a form actually tested and revised based on the data received, has been the basis for the startling developments in the field of computer communication and automation which have made the international global network possible. Because of U.S. government funding through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that accompanies U.S. government funding, and an atmosphere encouraging experimentation and innovation, the Arpanet pioneers were free from the limitations of commercial objectives and artificial time pressures. Obligations of the academic community to keep scientific work open to the public and to avoid using their funds to support particular commercial interests, in a similar way, made it possible for Usenet pioneers to participate in a network useful for the problems of automation that they have had to deal with, and the work they do.(14) Thus the development of the Arpanet and its evolution into the NSF backbone of the Internet and the creation and expansion of Usenet News are the harbinger for the significant new capacity of our society to produce for the needs of its people. It is this potential capacity, which is only beginning to be able to be realized, which is bringing down governments and economic systems that obstruct its fruition. This capacity has been developed by those free of market forces, by scientists and researchers, by computer scientists working under academic conditions or government contracts, and by student and amateur participants. The active cooperation of people around the world is a force to continue to expand the participatory nature of Usenet News and the international telecommunications network, the Internet, and to oppose efforts to commercialize and freeze these developments. A Net_Commonwealth is being created that portends to transform society as we now know it. Notes (1) Gregory Woodbury in a post on Usenet News on April 12, 1993. (2) "Invitation to a General Access Unix Network" by Tom Truscott, Duke University. Copy from Usenet History Archives. (3) Copy in the Usenet History Archives. (4) From email dated January 25, 1993, Usenet History List. (5) Map from Usenet History Archives. (6) See talk presented at the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning on "The Evolution of Usenet News: The Poor Man's ARPANET," March 15, 1993. (7) See for example Gene Spafford's "Usenet Software: History and Sources", available on Usenet News and Gregory G. Woodbury's "Net Cultural Assumptions" which has been posted on Usenet News. (8) From Usenet History Archives. (9) The CSNet created for Science and Computer faculty at Universities not connected to the Arpanet was part of the pressure that led to the NSF Net. See description in "The Social Forces Behind the Development of Usenet News" in The Amateur Computerist, vol 5, no 1-2. (10) Early statistics to 1988 compiled by Gene Spafford, latest statistics by David C. Lawrence. (11) See for example Usenet-II Mailing List of Nov. 10, 1985 in the Usenet History Archives. One of the posters to the list commented, "I don't want to be fixing the wrong problem." (12) Taken from "In praise of the choice Company of Philosophers and Wits who meet on Wednesdaies weekely at Gresham Colledge," in "The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty," ed. Charles Henry Hull, vol II, Cambridge, 1899, p. 324. (13) See "Sir Francis Bacon and the Shorter Hours Bill," The Amateur Computerist, vol 5, no 1-2. (14) See "Arte, Computers and Usenet News," in "The Amateur Computerist," vol 4 Supplement, Fall '92. --- This is work is being contributed to the Net to support its cooperative nature. It may be freely distributed for noncommercial purposes. Commercial use is not permitted. Ronda Hauben ronda@umcc.umich.edu Michael Hauben hauben@columbia.edu