The Tyranny of E-mail (11 page)

When it came to telling the story of one another’s lives, though, or sharing the details of an afternoon’s idyll, the rest of the world bridged this gap—this gap between
our
time and Time itself, from
our
minds and someone else’s—as it had since literacy became widespread. People withdrew and dialed into the inner quietude, that absence of sound we think of as
our most intimate selves
, and transformed it so that they could pass it along, share it. In other words, they wrote a letter and put it into the mail. Dramatically, radically, that would change at the end of the twentieth century.

The infrastructure we will need in the 21st century goes beyond traditional public works projects…. I envision a national computer network linking academic researchers and industry, using the nation’s vast data banks as the raw material for increasing industrial productivity and creating new products.

—
A
L
G
ORE
,
1988

We want to eliminate distance as a factor…. You can compare this to the kinds of things that happened in the 50’s in the United States. We need a project of the scale of a National Highway Project for computer information.

—
R
OBERT
H
ABER
,
1988

All the heckling radio hosts, wisecracking comedians, and savvy computer gurus were right: Al Gore did not “invent the Internet.” It’s also worth pointing out that the vice president never claimed to have done so; he merely brought a bill before the U.S. Senate aimed at creating a much larger, more user-friendly version of a network that already existed— ARPANET—and then made the mistake during his first presidential
campaign in 1988 of telling Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he had “taken initiative in creating the Internet.” Republican congressman Dick Armey pounced on Gore’s apparent hubris and put out a press release mocking the Tennessee senator, and in typical say-it-often-enough-and-it’s-true fashion, the word “create” evolved into “invent.” The transformation was so convoluted that Stanford University researchers actually did a media study on it in which they concluded, “Truth does not always win out in the marketplace of ideas, even when the marketplace is highly competitive.”

One of the reasons the story is believed to be true, though, has to do with the long gap between the development of the technology and networks that became the Internet and the public’s sudden and swift gravitation online in the mid-1990s. For most people, the Internet seemed to appear out of thin air in 1995. But ARPANET, the Internet’s granddaddy, was approaching thirty years of age at that point, long enough to have developed a lore and a following, not to mention a few name changes. Its first node was installed in UCLA in the late 1960s by a group of inspired, sleep-deprived researchers with a practical dream, and three more nodes were quickly added. They wanted to network with other academics around the country their hulking, washroom-sized supercomputers, machines so expensive and complicated to maintain that only a few universities in America had one.

The institutions and players that turned this dream into reality echoed the overlapping forces that had brought mail to the masses and the telegram to life: scientists needed a network so they could conduct research; the U.S. military badly needed a new kind of communication network to stay one step ahead of, well, everyone else. By the late 1960s, real-time computing— hardware and software systems that work together in highly deadline-oriented situations, as in antilock brakes—had been in use in radar and missile systems for two decades. ARPANET was that technology’s practical offshoot and fail-safe. A decentralized, secondary communication network would be essential in the event of a nuclear attack; given the climate of fear and dread in the United States in the 1950s, this was hardly the stuff of science fiction. Circumventing such an attack was not the explicit goal of ARPANET, but it was a prevailing preoccupation of one inventor who helped to make the whole thing possible: Paul Baran.

Like Morse’s, Baran’s impact as an inventor stretches across several practical realms. He is credited with inventing the airport metal detector, as well as the technology that is essential to the ATM and the DSL modem, which connects a computer to a high-speed phone line. But his place in history was secured by work he performed at the RAND Corporation between 1959 and 1965. RAND was a good home for a man worried about the future of American security, as Baran was. Founded in 1946 by the U.S. Army Air Corps, the corporation was set up to maintain the research capability built up by the United States during World War II. It was originally part of Douglas Aircraft Company, but in 1948 it was spun off and became its own independent nonprofit group. Between 1950 and 1970, Rand’s growing ranks of theorists and eggheads worked on systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, advanced computers, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. RAND also advised Robert McNamara on the failing Vietnam War, a role that became a political controversy when a RAND employee, Daniel Ellsberg, leaked seven thousand pages of classified documents to
New York Times
reporter Neil Sheehan. They would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

Baran’s work at RAND would never earn him the fame or notoriety that Ellsberg’s act of patriotism did, but it made a larger impact on the day-to-day life of people the world round. He had two strokes of genius, both of which would refine the structure of communication networks henceforth and assist the birth and incredible growth of what became known as the Internet. He pulled them both off by overshooting expectations. At the time, the military was merely concerned with preserving “minimal essential communications,” which Baran described in an interview as thus: “a euphemism for the President to be able
to say ‘You are authorized to fire your weapons.’ Or ‘hold your fire.’ These are very short messages. The initial strategic concept at that time was if you can build a communications system that could survive and transmit such short messages, that is all that is needed.”

After talking to generals, though, Baran realized there would be an immediate need for such a network to carry more data. When he couldn’t get a clear answer for how much more, he simply decided to design something that would be able to handle an almost unlimited amount of information. His solution was to sketch out what is now called a distributed network. In a centralized network, all roads lead back to the same place; in a decentralized network, all roads lead to a number of different places. A distributed network has no center. Rather, it resembles a map of the human brain, with each “node” connected to several others. This meant that no attack on a central node could knock out all communications.

Second, and more important, Baran suggested that messages could be broken up into pieces and sent along this network, then reassembled at the point of their destination. Thanks to the advent of digital technology, data could be encoded into a series of 1s and 0s, and, if marked properly, a message could travel the most efficient route possible to its destination. If there were a slowdown in one place, the message would simply take another route. In her fabulous history of the Internet’s early days,
Where the Wizards Stay Up Late
, Katie Hafner uses the metaphor of shipping a house from Boston to Los Angeles on the American interstate highways to explain why this is effective. “As long as each driver has clear instructions telling him where to deliver his load and he is told to take the fastest way he can find, chances are that all the pieces will arrive at
their destination in Los Angeles, but if each piece of the house carries a label indicating the place in the overall structure, the order of arrival doesn’t matter. The rebuilders can find the right parts and put them together in the right places.”

Baran’s ideas were eventually embraced at RAND, but, as with Morse and his telegram, the world did not leap to assist him. Five years and numerous meetings with AT&T later, in which the long-distance carrier refused to even allow RAND to test its wires, Baran gave up and moved on. As with the telegram, it turned out that Baran was not alone with his invention. Over in Britain, Donald Watts Davies of the National Physical Laboratory had been playing with a very similar idea, which he decided to call packet switching. Finally, back in the United States, a third man, Leonard Kleinrock, had written a dissertation that put together a mathematical theory of packet switching, which would prove essential to the Internet, and was developing early thoughts about how to put it into action.

Through luck and smart hiring, these men and their ideas all came to bear on a fledgling research agency started up in the Defense Department called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was formed in 1958 in direct response to the Soviet launch of
Sputnik
. Within two years of its creation, though, when all space-related research was transferred to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), also created in 1958, ARPA had nearly become redundant. The agency’s response was to begin directing its energy to exploratory research programs—and after many long hours and false starts, ARPANET, the world’s first operational packet-switching network, was one of its finest results. The first message was sent across the network on October 29, 1969.

This written record shows a log of the first message sent; it is not the first e-mail ever sent. Messaging between terminals linked to a mainframe computer had existed since the early 1960s, and by the late 1960s more than a thousand people used this tool at MIT alone. But sending messages from one separate computer to the next over a network was new and the beginning of a brand-new age of communication. In 1973, Ray Tomlinson would make it even easier by using the @ symbol to separate an address from the domain name, making e-mail addresses easier to write out; it was as if suddenly e-mails had a zip code system. E-mail was on its way.

As a network, though, ARPANET still had a long way to go before achieving the dream of simultaneous computing. But on one front it was an immediate and almost instant success. In 1973, a study was commissioned to see how the new network was being used. As it turned out, people weren’t using it so much to share computing power, as intended. In fact, the eggheads who had access to it were doing something else entirely, not always productively, in a precursor to our situation today: 75 percent of the traffic over ARPANET was e-mail.

Over the next two decades, the creation of additional networks; cheaper connectivity costs; the codification of universal mail protocol, which allowed different systems and machines to pass messages along; and the development of faster connection speeds turned e-mail from a techie toy into a household hobby. Telenet, a civilian equivalent of ARPANET, was launched in 1974 by Larry Roberts, one of the men who had shepherded ARPANET into existence, and it had enough promise that GTE bought it in 1979; Usenet, which allowed remote users to access bulletin boards, was launched by two Duke University graduate students that same year. By the early 1980s, there were dozens of networks in existence, and the number of host computers—essentially, machines connected to the Internet— most of which, by a large margin, were in North America, exploded from 213 in 1981 to 28,174 in 1987 to 313,000 in 1990. Users followed. In 1988, just 10 percent of the 19 million PCs worldwide were connected to the Internet; by 2006, Intel estimated that more than 1 billion PCs were connected, a growth made possible by rapidly decreasing PC costs and the introduction of good browsers.

The online universe that came into being from this amalgamation has radically altered human life in more ways than simply making it easier to purchase movie tickets. It altered our sense of time and space just as radically as the telegram did; ushered in an era of continuous news, since online news sites could be updated from minute to minute; and made it easier than ever to communicate at letter length at such little cost that it quickly spawned a culture of e-mail overload. Why bother sending a letter when you can just fire off an e-mail for free and have it get there instantly? More important, though,
it brought people into an ever-tighter embrace with machines, which, from the beginning, were intended to blur the boundary between “inside” and “outside,” a confusion that would later make it an irresistible medium for advertisers (in the form of spam).

It’s worthwhile to detour for a moment to think about the PC’s role in bringing this about. As John Markoff describes in
What the Dormouse Said
, the PC grew out of the counter-cultural environment of California in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when computer research, clinical trials of psychedelics, and the literary experiments of the Beat movement combined and overlapped in groups that bounced between San Francisco and Palo Alto to the East Bay. The goal of the PC—like that of Jack Kerouac’s “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity”—was mind expansion, so much so that Douglas Engelbart, the Stanford Research Institute researcher who coinvented the mouse and did more than any designer to affect how computers present themselves to us, titled his seminal paper about the future of computing “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The computer was not just an expensive calculator in Engelbart’s vision; it should and could become an intimate, essential part of our thinking tasks.

Four decades on, Engelbart’s vision of the man-computer embrace is a reality. How many of us can imagine going to work without one now? Can we even imagine working on a PC without Internet access? Not since the typewriter has a piece of machinery and what it’s capable of changed work life in such a dramatic way. A typewriter helped you type faster. It also made word processing easier, especially once erase and edit functions were added, tilting the machine toward a word processor. The standardized keyboard on typewriters also introduced a new interface to writing—for the first
time in the history of writing since pencils and pens became widely available.