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What did John Klensin do for the Internet? A little bit of everything.
In April, Klensin was inducted into the Internet Society’s (ISOC) Internet Hall of Fame, entering alongside such notable names as Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Larry Roberts. But unlike many of the other inductees, Klensin isn’t known for one seminal idea or creation you can describe in a sentence or two. If you look back over his role in the evolution of the Internet, he’s more like the jack of all trades.
Klensin was part of a small group of academics and other minds who built the ARPAnet — a research network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense — and gradually turned it into the worldwide internet we know today. He’s the author of over 40 Request for Comments, or RFC, the technical documents that have defined the architecture of the network for more than 40 years.
The way Klensin tells it, he grew up in southern Arizona, enrolled as student at MIT, and “never quite escaped.” His area of study was political science, but part of his work involved how communications could influence social and policy sciences,...
It was 4:00 in the morning, and Leonard Kleinrock was sitting inside MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory on the outskirts of Boston, hunched in front of a massive computer system known as the TX-2.
This was the early 1960s, and Kleinrock, an MIT graduate student, was designing a new means of sending information between the TX-2 and other computers of the day. But on this particular night, he was at the end of his rope. “I was tired. I was hungry. I was grumpy. And I had a bad taste in my mouth,” Kleinrock remembers. And then the TX-2 started to hiss.
The TX-2 was an experimental machine, and, well, this was the early 1960s. Kleinrock was worried the system was about to die on him. Just above his head, there was a small gap in the front of the system — an 8-inch by 1-inch hole where a panel had been removed for repairs — and as he looked through the gap, he suddenly realized where the hiss was coming from.
“I saw two eyes staring back at me through the hole in the console. It was that son of bitch Larry Roberts!” Kleinrock says. And in this case, “son of bitch” is a term of affection. Larry Roberts...
Lawrence Roberts calls himself the founder of the Internet. And it’s hard to argue with him.
In 1966, the U.S. Department of Defense hired Roberts to design the ARPAnet, a computer network that would connect various research outfits across the country. He based the network on a brand-new concept called “packet-switching,” and thanks in large part to this choice, the ARPAnet would eventually morph into the modern Internet.
This past April, in recognition of his work, Larry Roberts was inducted into the Internet Society’s (ISOC) Internet Hall of Fame, alongside such seminal thinkers as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web; Ray Tomlinson, the father of email; and Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the fathers of TCP/IP, the fundamental protocols that underpin the Internet.
The irony is that Larry Roberts didn’t want to build the ARPAnet. As internet historian Jim Pelkey puts it, Roberts was “blackmailed” into taking the job.
In the early 1960s, Roberts was a researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Lab on the outskirts of Boston, where he built a system...
Building a computer network in space, as Google’s Vint Cerf has proposed, is all well and good, but Toru Takahashi wants to foster better digital communication much closer to home. “Cerf is very eager for interplanetary communication, I think some kind of inner-mind communication is what’s needed,” says Takahashi with only a bit of leg pulling.
Takahashi, like Cerf, is considered an Internet pioneer and has spent decades promoting the internet and better communication in his native Japan. The power of the internet as a mode to bring people closer together is what drove the Internet Hall of Fame inductee to leave a career as a writer and editor in the early ‘80s and put his energy toward assembling the pieces of what would become the internet in Japan.
Unlike many of his peers, Takahashi came relatively late to the technology world. Trained at Tohoku University in the mid ‘60s in aesthetics and art history, he was introduced to technology when he took on a marketing job at the Laboratory of Innovation for Quality of Life, a sort of technology think tank. After the think tank, Takahashi landed at Digital Computer Limited where he managed UNIX workstations and the development of high-speed networks. “Everything was so fresh and attractive,” Takahashi says. “I learned UNIX, studied artificial intelligence, database technologies, everything was fascinating.”
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The fundamental technology underpinning the Internet is called packet-switching. And Donald Davies was the first one to call it that.
In the mid-1960s, Davies was a researcher with Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, or NPL, when he started exploring a new breed of networking that involved breaking information into tiny messages, before shipping them from place to place. He dubbed the tiny messages “packets,” and after he and other NPL researchers unveiled a paper on this research, the name stuck — as did the technology. In a very big way.
At the time, others were developing similar networking techniques, including Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation, Leonard Kleinrock at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Larry Roberts with ARPA, the research operation funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, and all four of these efforts dovetailed as Roberts and ARPA spawned the ARPAnet, a packet-switched network that would eventually give rise to the internet.
“Kleinrock, Baran, Davies, and Roberts developed their [packet-switching] ideas pretty much independently,” says...