Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503110019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In Cambridge, Mass., a dozen technicians were laboring in obscurity to build the world's first computer network - the birth of cyberspace.
They made their goal in just nine months, with precious little fanfare outside their close-knit community of technophiles.
Nobody much knew what to do with the computer network they created then, not the Pentagon that paid for it, not the engineers who made it work.
"It's interesting, these people were primarily technicians interested in a technical project," says Judy O'Neill, a University of Minnesota computer scientist who's written a book on the early days of computing. "They were not trying to change society."
But change it, they did.
A quarter-century later, the computer network they flicked on has evolved into something so powerful that it circles the globe, so ubiquitous that even schookids are tapping in - the Internet.
From his sheep farm in Giles County, Bernie Cosell now looks back on his creation with a certain bemusement, as if it were a stray lamb. "It's pretty fun to see this thing we built still running around."
Bernie Cosell's not quite sure what his place in history is. "My guess is I don't have a place in history," he says.
That's not entirely true. As the Internet has become the buzzword of the '90s, the interest in the 'net's origins has spiked, too. Books are being written, oral histories recorded, corporate anniversary dinners organized - all marking something that didn't seem terribly dramatic at the time.
In the mid-1960s, there'd been a burst of research into how computers could communicate with one another. This caught the eye of the military. The Pentagon was looking for an easy way that scientists doing defense-related research at one university could share their work with colleagues at another.
Suppose there was a giant computer network that everyone could plug into?
The Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency - ARPA, for short - took bids for companies to try to design one. The contract went to BBN, a high-tech company just outside Boston.
"It was really a blue-sky project," Cosell recalls. "No one knew how it would work."
About a dozen technicians were assembled, some to build the hardware, some to design the software. Cosell, four years out of college, was one of the three software engineers. "We were all pretty hotshot programmers," he brags.
Within the software team, Will Crowther was the idea guy. Dave Walden was the guy who figured out how to translate Crowther's ideas into programming. And Cosell was the one who'd actually do the programming, and make sure it worked.
"Bernie was the most impressive software de-bugger I've ever met," Walden says. "The kind of software we were developing was pretty complex. Sometimes you'd run into terrifically difficult problems. Bernie's ability to figure out the problem was pretty close to miraculous."
Looking back, the computer world was a primitive place in 1969. Instead of recording their data on floppy discs, programmers tapped out their codes on long rolls of computer tape, much like ticker-tape. If the tape tore, or one of the codes was mistyped, they'd have to start from scratch. Bernie remembers that once he and his teammates pulled an all-nighter to test certain codes. "Most of that time was spent feeding paper into very clunky machines," he recalls.
Yet after only nine months of work, the researchers were ready. In September 1969, a computer at UCLA dialed up one at Stanford, and the world's first computer network was born. It's never been off-line since.
Cosell wonders whether the technicians who made it happen were too successful for their own good.
"The focus shifted almost immediately from, `would the network work?' to making it useful, which brought in hundreds of people. They all took for granted there's this machine that works like the phone company. Nobody thought about how it worked. They just assumed it would happen. In retrospect, I think that's a pretty big technical accomplishment. If it crashed a lot, there would have been a lot of studies about how it limped to life. Instead, we just turned the switch and it worked."
For much of the 1970s, Cosell was the equivalent of the maintenance man for the ARPAnet. One of his jobs was to monitor the network from a computer in Cambridge, and alert local telephone companies around the country whenever their lines went dead - taking one leg of the ARPAnet down with them.
It was often a job that involved explaining to befuddled phone company technicians just what a computer network was.
"They were used to dealing with people at either end of the line," Cosell says. But he could figure out from his computer when, say, a computer link in the Midwest went down. "So you call up Telco and you get some sleepy guy in Cincinnati in the middle of the night and you tell him circuit 87305 from [The University of Illinois in] Champaign-Urbana is down. He says, `OK, what's your number?' You give him your number. And he notices the area code is in Massachusetts. So he says `what's the phone number you're calling?' I'd have to tell him, it doesn't matter, when it comes back up, I'll be able to tell, even though I'm thousands of miles away. It's interesting talking to guys in the middle of the night convincing him this is all right."
At first, Cosell says, no one knew quite what to do with the ARPAnet. Researchers at one university weren't accustomed to dialing into a computer at another to do their work; sometimes the universities even discouraged it. One of the most popular features of cyberspace today - electronic mail - was an afterthought that hadn't been invented yet.
But in time, other computer networks sprung up in the 1970s, and were connected together; that's when the ARPAnet evolved into the Internet, the self-perpetuating global network of networks.
And Cosell went on to other jobs at BBN, as the company's resident software problem-solver. "Bernie was on a number of occasions called off what he was working on to rescue a project that was in trouble," Walden says. "Bernie was like a built-in insurance policy. You knew if it got in trouble, you can send in Bernie."
"He's a legend around here," agrees Jeff Mayersohn, BBN's vice president for corporate communications. "He's one of the best programmers we've ever had."
Computer historians, such as Virginia Tech's John Lee, editor of the Annals of the History of Computing, are amazed to have a computer pioneer living just over the mountain. "He's not famous," Lee says of Cosell. "That's one of the things that bugs me. There are these people out there, and very few people know them."
by CNB