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Innovators
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Larry Roberts
Electrical engineer and computer scientist Larry
Roberts (1937-) headed the ARPANET program and
was responsible for the overall design of the network.
His design helped make it possible for the ARPANET
to evolve into the Internet.
Transcript:
Back in 1964 Dr. Licklider who was both at MIT as a
professor and running the original A.R.P.A. activity,
convinced me that internetworking of computers was
going to be a tremendously important thing in the
future to get the knowledge distributed. So I
undertook that as a major undertaking and started
doing experiments at MIT in '65 and '66 to see how
two computers could interact. Decided that we
needed packet switching and we needed a new
network, not just the computers would be the
problem. Then was asked to come to ARPA to run the
project to build the network. So I designed the
network and went to ARPA to build it. And I think that
the goal that I had in mind was to connect all the
computers and get the availability of knowledge to be
distributed widely throughout the world so that
anybody could get at any knowledge at any time very
quickly. I think that's what happened with the web.
Many other things have happened: e-mail, phone, and
telephone, and many other things which we quickly
realized were also part of the effect. But the basic
distribution of the knowledge I think, has been the
biggest impact on humanity than anything: people
able to get at information anywhere, instantly. The
difference in ARPANET actually was the fact that it
was packet switching communications network as
well as the first way to intercommunicate between
computers. Actually you needed packet switching to
do that effectively as we did in the first experiment,
found that that was necessary. So, the ARPANET
proved that packet switching worked, that the packet
wouldn't fall on the floor as all the communications
scientists told me. That it was much more economic,
much more reliable than any other communications
media. And it has proved that for data originally and
now voice and pretty soon video that's the primary
mechanism for communication, and it is far better and
more economic than the circuit switch networks.
Simultaneously we showed that computers could
communicate and could be accessible by anybody
anywhere and the data could be made available to
anybody. |
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