INTERNET HISTORY NEWSLETTER - NOVEMBER 2004
Welcome to the Internet History Newsletter, brought to you by the
www.nethistory.info website. In this
edition:
=> FROM OUR MAIL - more on When Did the Internet Begin?
=> FEATURE ARTICLE - Election night and Univac, 1952
=> Special Christmas Offer
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FROM OUR MAIL - MORE ON WHEN DID THE INTERNET BEGIN?
There was quite a debate again this month on the origins of the Internet on Dave
Farber's mailing list, following from the announcement of a "35th anniversary
celebration" for the Internet.
The exchange involved people including Leonard Kleinrock, one of the pioneers of
packet switching, John Shoch, a key figure in early Internet protocol
development, and Bob Taylor, who was head of the Arpanet project where the
Internet supposedly began.
Relevant parts of the thread are reproduced at www.nethistory.info/archives/origins.html
. It's well worth a read, and reveals some tensions among the pioneers.
Among the surprises in the exchange was this one from Bob Taylor, who was head
of the Arpanet program, and who has yet a different theory on beginnings. To
quote Bob from the above exchange:
"I believe the first internet was created at Xerox PARC, circa '75, when we
connected, via PUP, the Ethernet with the ARPAnet. PUP (PARC Universal Protocol)
was instrumental later in defining TCP (ask Metcalfe or Shoch, they were there).
For the internet to grow, it also needed a networked personal computer, a
graphical user interface with WYSIWYG properties, modern word processing, and
desktop publishing. These, along with the Ethernet, all came out of my lab at
Xerox PARC in the '70s, and were commercialized over the next 20 years by Adobe,
Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that were necessary to
the development of the Internet.
The ARPAnet was not an internet. An internet is a connection between two or more
computer networks. The ARPAnet, with help from thousands of people, slowly
evolved into the Internet. Without the ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a
much longer time in coming".
So there you go - yet another theory on origins.
And a great note on the history of the Xerox Palo Alto laboratory, a real hotbed
of innovation! You can find out more from our
Computer history pages.
FEATURE ARTICLE - UNIVAC AND ELECTIONS
Also current in a lot of peoples minds at present are elections. That brought
out this delightful piece of computer history, written by USA Today stalwart
Kevin Maney. You can get the full story at
http://tinyurl.com/5qk8f
"There was another election season, back in 1952, when a presidential contest
seemed too close to call, America worried it was vulnerable to attack, and a
single company dominated computing.
Those circumstances set the stage for the election night dramatics of the Univac
- perhaps the most significant live TV performance ever by a computer. It might
just be technology's equivalent of the first Elvis appearance on The Ed Sullivan
Show. Except parents didn't worry that computers were going to destroy the moral
fiber of the nation's youth, which shows you how much parents know.
In a few hours on Nov. 4, 1952, Univac altered politics, changed the world's
perception of computers and upended the tech industry's status quo. Along the
way, it embarrassed CBS long before Dan Rather could do that all by himself.
The Republican candidate was Dwight Eisenhower. The Democrat, Adlai Stevenson.
Polls showed them in a dead heat.
On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in Philadelphia.
In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer - a panel embedded with blinking
Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite sat next to it. Correspondent
Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set up in front of the real Univac........
As polls began to close, clerks typed the data into the Univac using three
Unityper machines, which punched holes in a paper tape that would be fed into
the computer.
By 8:30 p.m. ET - long before news organizations of the era knew national
election outcomes - Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower
would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 - a landslide victory. Because
every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn't believe the computer and
refused to air the prediction.
"Mauchly was at home getting telephone calls all the time about what was
happening," Antonelli says. "All he could say was, 'Sit tight, we've done the
best we could.' We sat there all night in front of the TV set with bated
breath."
"It was essentially a live demo, on national TV," says Jim Senior, historian at
Unisys, the computer giant that traces its roots to Remington Rand and Univac.
"That took a lot of daring."
Under pressure, Woodbury rejiggered the algorithms. Univac then gave Eisenhower
8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported that on the air. But
Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a mistake. He ran the numbers again
and got the original results - an Eisenhower landslide.
Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been right.
Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to millions of
viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.
In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower
and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the
popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum
tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A
musical Hallmark card has more computing power.
The public latched onto the Univac's performance. In 1952, people were as
intrigued by computers as we are by SpaceShipOne. Stories ran on newspaper front
pages. "Univac" suddenly became a generic term for those blinking electric
brains. Much to IBM's disgust, when IBM introduced the 701 a few months later,
people referred to it as "IBM's Univac."
In the public's mind, the Univac was the new leader in computing. And by 1956,
the TV networks all used computers and predicted results early, changing the
dynamics of Election Day.
And where has that gotten us? Back to a presidential contest too close to call,
a nation worried it is vulnerable to attack, and a single company dominating
computing.
How did that happen?
(orginal article by USA Today's Kevin Maney can be read at
http://tinyurl.com/5qk8f
SPECIAL CHRISTMAS OFFER
And just one thing in closing. Christmas is close to us, and we have a special
surprise for net readers. With only one more newsletter to come before
Christmas, we thought we would let you know early.
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Remember - if you are buying copies for Christmas presents for your loved ones,
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Internet history is multidimensional and fascinating. It's the history of our
times, and of a phenomena which is quite different to anything the world has
seen before. We hope you will share our enthusiasm for this exciting and
captivating period of the history of our times.
Here's the url again ….
Until next month,
Ian Peter