Bruce Sterling's 1993 Short History of the Internet

Here's a relaxing trip back to 1993. Even better, Austin Texas in 1993. Bruce doesn't mention it here, but he was in at least his third decade as an Austinite at the time. He had published The Hacker Crackdown in 1992 and it has some discussion of his own experiences with computers and networks. This article undoubtedly grew along with and out of the book.

Had forgotten this since reading it thirty-three years ago and rediscovered it this morning. Similar to The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce published it as freeware. When you've enjoyed this pure pleasure, ordering a copy of both The Hacker Crackdown and Schismatrix seems like a good way to say thanks.

Enjoy!

Short History of the Internet

From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, February 1993  
Written by Bruce Sterling  
Literary Freeware – Not for Commercial Use
F&SF Science Column #5 “Internet”

Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America’s foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war?

Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters.

And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The center of the network would be the very first place to go. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild of RAND staffer Paul Baran) was made public in 1964. In the first place, the network would have no central authority. Furthermore, it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.

The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis.

The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn’t matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This rather haphazard delivery system might be “inefficient” in the usual sense (especially compared to, say, the telephone system) — but it would be extremely rugged.

During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized, blastproof, packet-switching network was kicked around by RAND, MIT and UCLA. The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the first test network on these principles in 1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to fund a larger, more ambitious project in the USA. The nodes of the network were to be high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers at the time). These were rare and valuable machines which were in real need of good solid networking, for the sake of national research-and-development projects.

In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high-speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another’s computer facilities by long-distance. This was a very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the early ’70s. In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven nodes. And it was good.

By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became clear. ARPANET’s users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post- office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages. Researchers were using ARPANET to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on work, and eventually, to downright gossip and schmooze. People had their own personal user accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about this particular service — far more enthusiastic than they were about long-distance computation.

It wasn’t long before the invention of the mailing-list, an ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could be sent automatically to large numbers of network subscribers. Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists was “SF-LOVERS,” for science fiction fans. Discussing science fiction on the network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many ARPANET computer administrators, but this didn’t stop it from happening.

Throughout the ’70s, ARPA’s network grew. Its decentralized structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer networks, the ARPA network could accommodate many different kinds of machine. As long as individual machines could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic network, their brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were irrelevant.

The ARPA’s original standard for communication was known as NCP, “Network Control Protocol,” but as time passed and the technique advanced, NCP was superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or “Transmission Control Protocol,” converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or “Internet Protocol,” handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards — not only ARPA’s pioneering NCP standard, but others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25.

As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link to ARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled, at least until 1983, when its military segment broke off and became MILNET. But TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET itself, though it was growing, became a smaller and smaller neighborhood amid the vastly growing galaxy of other linked machines.

As the ’70s and ’80s advanced, many very different social groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of- networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire other networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-domain, and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact, nobody wanted to stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which came to be known as the “Internet.”

Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing, since each node was independent, and had to handle its own financing and its own technical requirements. The more, the merrier. Like the phone network, the computer network became steadily more valuable as it embraced larger and larger territories of people and resources. A fax machine is only valuable if everybody else has a fax machine. Until they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity. ARPANET, too, was a curiosity for a while. Then computer-networking became an utter necessity.

In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. And other government agencies leapt in: NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, each of them maintaining a digital satrapy in the Internet confederation.

The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied up into basic varieties. Foreign computers, and a few American ones, chose to be denoted by their geographical locations. The others were grouped by the six basic Internet “domains”: gov, mil, edu, com, org and net. (Graceless abbreviations such as this are a standard feature of the TCP/IP protocols.) Gov, Mil, and Edu denoted governmental, military and educational institutions, which were, of course, the pioneers, since ARPANET had begun as a high-tech research exercise in national security. Com, however, stood for “commercial” institutions, which were soon bursting into the network like rodeo bulls, surrounded by a dust-cloud of eager nonprofit “orgs.” (The “net” computers served as gateways between networks.)

ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its own overwhelming success. Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET’s functions not only continued but steadily improved. The use of TCP/IP standards for computer networking is now global. In 1971, a mere twenty-one years ago, there were only four nodes in the ARPANET network. Today there are tens of thousands of nodes in the Internet, scattered over forty-two countries, with more coming on-line every day. Three million, possibly four million people use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks.

The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is probably the most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth century. The powerful, sophisticated access that it provides to specialized data and personal communication has sped up the pace of scientific research enormously. The Internet’s pace of growth in the early 1990s is spectacular, almost ferocious. It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster than fax machines. Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of twenty percent a month. The number of “host” machines with direct connection to TCP/IP has been doubling every year since 1988. The Internet is moving out of its original base in military and research institutions, into elementary and high schools, as well as into public libraries and the commercial sector.

Why do people want to be “on the Internet?” One of the main reasons is simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy. There is no “Internet Inc.” There are no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders. In principle, any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long as it obeys the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly technical, not social or political. (There has been some struggle over commercial use of the Internet, but that situation is changing as businesses supply their own links).

The Internet is also a bargain. The Internet as a whole, unlike the phone system, doesn’t charge for long-distance service. And unlike most commercial computer networks, it doesn’t charge for access time, either. In fact the “Internet” itself, which doesn’t even officially exist as an entity, never “charges” for anything. Each group of people accessing the Internet is responsible for their own machine and their own section of line.

The Internet’s “anarchy” may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It’s rather like the “anarchy” of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it’s up to you to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please of it (though the government provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and write a bit). Otherwise, everybody just sort of pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and somehow turns out workable. And interesting. Fascinating, even. Though a lot of people earn their living from using and exploiting and teaching English, “English” as an institution is public property, a public good. Much the same goes for the Internet. Would English be improved if the “The English Language, Inc.” had a board of directors and a chief executive officer, or a President and a Congress? There’d probably be a lot fewer new words in English, and a lot fewer new ideas. People on the Internet feel much the same way about their own institution. It’s an institution that resists institutionalization. The Internet belongs to everyone and no one.

Still, its various interest groups all have a claim. Business people want the Internet put on a sounder financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spy-proof and secure. And so on and so on. All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance today, and the Internet, so far, remains in a thrivingly anarchical condition. Once upon a time, the NSFnet’s high-speed, high-capacity lines were known as the “Internet Backbone,” and their owners could rather lord it over the rest of the Internet; but today there are “backbones” in Canada, Japan, and Europe, and even privately owned commercial Internet backbones specially created for carrying business traffic. Today, even privately owned desktop computers can become Internet nodes. You can carry one under your arm. Soon, perhaps, on your wrist.

But what does one do with the Internet? Four things, basically: mail, discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file transfers.

Internet mail is “e-mail,” electronic mail, faster by several orders of magnitude than the US Mail, which is scornfully known by Internet regulars as “snailmail.” Internet mail is somewhat like fax. It’s electronic text. But you don’t have to pay for it (at least not directly), and it’s global in scope. E-mail can also send software and certain forms of compressed digital imagery. New forms of mail are in the works.

The discussion groups, or “newsgroups,” are a world of their own. This world of news, debate and argument is generally known as “USENET. ” USENET is, in point of fact, quite different from the Internet. USENET is rather like an enormous billowing crowd of gossipy, news-hungry people, wandering in and through the Internet on their way to various private backyard barbecues. USENET is not so much a physical network as a set of social conventions. In any case, at the moment there are some 2,500 separate newsgroups on USENET, and their discussions generate about 7 million words of typed commentary every single day. Naturally there is a vast amount of talk about computers on USENET, but the variety of subjects discussed is enormous, and it’s growing larger all the time. USENET also distributes various free electronic journals and publications.

Both netnews and e-mail are very widely available, even outside the high-speed core of the Internet itself. News and e-mail are easily available over common phone-lines, from Internet fringe- realms like BITnet, UUCP and Fidonet. The last two Internet services, long-distance computing and file transfer, require what is known as “direct Internet access” — using TCP/IP.

Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for ARPANET and is still a very useful service, at least for some. Programmers can maintain accounts on distant, powerful computers, run programs there or write their own. Scientists can make use of powerful supercomputers a continent away. Libraries offer their electronic card catalogs for free search. Enormous CD-ROM catalogs are increasingly available through this service. And there are fantastic amounts of free software available.

File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines and retrieve programs or text. Many Internet computers — some two thousand of them, so far — allow any person to access them anonymously, and to simply copy their public files, free of charge. This is no small deal, since entire books can be transferred through direct Internet access in a matter of minutes. Today, in 1992, there are over a million such public files available to anyone who asks for them (and many more millions of files are available to people with accounts). Internet file-transfers are becoming a new form of publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies the work on demand, in any quantity he or she wants, for free. New Internet programs, such as “archie,” “gopher,” and “WAIS,” have been developed to catalog and explore these enormous archives of material.

The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore for the Internet, and today such computers sell for less than $2,000 and are in the hands of people all over the world. ARPA’s network, designed to assure control of a ravaged society after a nuclear holocaust, has been superceded by its mutant child the Internet, which is thoroughly out of control, and spreading exponentially through the post-Cold War electronic global village. The spread of the Internet in the 90s resembles the spread of personal computing in the 1970s, though it is even faster and perhaps more important. More important, perhaps, because it may give those personal computers a means of cheap, easy storage and access that is truly planetary in scale.

The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially faster. Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot topic today, with every manner of wild new commercial information- service promised. The federal government, pleased with an unsought success, is also still very much in the act. NREN, the National Research and Education Network, was approved by the US Congress in fall 1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet “backbone.” NREN will be some fifty times faster than the fastest network available today, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot second. Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high- definition television. A multimedia global circus!

Or so it’s hoped — and planned. The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today’s plans. Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet. After all, today’s Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND’s post- holocaust command grid. It’s a fine and happy irony.

How does one get access to the Internet? Well — if you don’t have a computer and a modem, get one. Your computer can act as a terminal, and you can use an ordinary telephone line to connect to an Internet-linked machine. These slower and simpler adjuncts to the Internet can provide you with the netnews discussion groups and your own e-mail address. These are services worth having — though if you only have mail and news, you’re not actually “on the Internet” proper.

If you’re on a campus, your university may have direct “dedicated access” to high-speed Internet TCP/IP lines. Apply for an Internet account on a dedicated campus machine, and you may be able to get those hot-dog long-distance computing and file-transfer functions. Some cities, such as Cleveland, supply “freenet” community access. Businesses increasingly have Internet access, and are willing to sell it to subscribers. The standard fee is about $40 a month — about the same as TV cable service.

As the Nineties proceed, finding a link to the Internet will become much cheaper and easier. Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness. Learning the Internet now, or at least learning about it, is wise. By the turn of the century, “network literacy,” like “computer literacy” before it, will be forcing itself into the very texture of your life.

For Further Reading:

The Whole Internet Catalog & User’s Guide by Ed Krol. (1992) O’Reilly and Associates, Inc. A clear, non-jargonized introduction to the intimidating business of network literacy. Many computer- documentation manuals attempt to be funny. Mr. Krol’s book is actually funny.

The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide. by John Quarterman. Digital Press: Bedford, MA. (1990) Massive and highly technical compendium detailing the mind-boggling scope and complexity of our newly networked planet.

The Internet Companion by Tracy LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer (1992) Addison Wesley. Evangelical etiquette guide to the Internet featuring anecdotal tales of life-changing Internet experiences. Foreword by Senator Al Gore.

Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner’s Guide by Brendan P. Kehoe (1992) Prentice Hall. Brief but useful Internet guide with plenty of good advice on useful machines to paw over for data. Mr Kehoe’s guide bears the singularly wonderful distinction of being available in electronic form free of charge.

I’m doing the same with all my F&SF Science articles, including, of course, this one.

Texas Minor Planet Project and Hubble Space Telescope Astrometry

The story of laser ranging at McDonald Observatory and its role in operational satellite tracking at UT can be traced back to Harlan Smith, a pioneering administrator who foresaw the critical role that ground-based observatories would play in supporting space exploration. He successfully convinced NASA, the National Science Foundation, and UT Austin to jointly fund the 107-inch telescope at McDonald Observatory in the sixties. This telescope became the primary ground-based facility for the pioneering lunar laser ranging experiments and was classed as a component in the overall Apollo program. He also served on major national committees, including the National Academy of Sciences committee that helped lay the groundwork for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble was good example of how McDonald integrated into the space age, particularly the structural role McDonald played in Hubble astrometry and the parallels with McDonald’s role in geodesy. Both astrometry and geodesy are concerned with fundamental reference measurements, of the celestial and terrestrial realms respectively. For Hubble, McDonald provided precise ground-based tracking data for calibrating the spacecraft's instruments via a direct integration between the Texas Minor Planet Program and the Hubble astrometry team. The primary astrometric instruments aboard Hubble were the fine guidance sensors. To achieve sub-millisecond of arc precision, the astrometry team had to map and correct severe optical field angle distortions caused by the telescope's mirrors and refractive optics. While static distortions were mapped by observing distant, fixed star clusters like M35, the team also needed to perform dynamic calibrations, such as tracking time-varying mechanical flexures, scale changes, and the alignment between the three independent fine guidance units. To do this, they needed to track moving celestial targets with highly predictable paths. Minor planets, or asteroids, were selected as the ideal moving targets. [1]

For the fine guidance calibration to work, the orbital paths of these minor planets had to be known to a higher degree of accuracy than the guidance sensor measurement precision itself. To achieve this, Paul Hemenway and Raynor Duncombe initiated the Texas Minor Planet Program in 1978. The intro photo of this post shows Paul on the left and Ray on the right. Between, left to right, are Bill Jefferys, Fritz Benedict, and Pete Shelus.

Using the long-focus Cassegrain focal plane of the 82-inch telescope at McDonald, the team targeted thirty-four specific minor planets, twenty of which were suited for HST observation. Over the course of the project, researchers captured more than a thousand glass photographic plates of these asteroids. An innovation of the program was the crossing-point method. By taking observations exactly where the projected paths of two different minor planets intersected, researchers could compare the objects against the same local background stars at different times, effectively isolating and eliminating systematic star catalog errors from their orbit reductions.

The precise ground-based observations from McDonald were processed by orbit determination specialists at UT Austin's Center for Space Research. By feeding the McDonald data into complex dynamical models, the team refined the asteroid orbits so that their orbital uncertainty was reduced to near-zero. Because these ground-truth reference trajectories were so precise, any deviations or residuals recorded by the fine guidance sensors could be attributed directly to their own instrumental distortions rather than the asteroid's actual motion.

This integration of McDonald Observatory's minor planet data and Hubble astrometry was used to resolve broader issues in celestial mechanics. The combined data allowed researchers to measure the unknown rotation of the European Hipparcos satellite's instrumental coordinate system, effectively linking the stellar optical reference system to a dynamical, gravity-based reference frame. These results were directly incorporated into the celestial reference frame, much as the McDonald geodetic measurements were incorporated in the terrestrial reference frame. Both of these research fields, astrometry and geodesy, can be traced directly to the inspiration from Harlan Smith to focus on participating as fully as possible in NASA’s space missions, tying McDonald and the West Texas Chihuahuan Desert together with the realm of satellites and spacecraft.

Harlan Smith and Ray Duncombe. Many count themselves fortunate to have known Harlan and Ray.

The 82-inch telescope at McDonald, where glass-plate photographs of asteroids were made on many a Chihuahuan Desert night.

Operator's console on the observer's deck.

[1] HST Astrometry Team 

Transit Satellites and the 1961 TRW-130 Minicomputer

This post explores a curious intersection of several UT computing stories during the sixties, all connected with providing periodic corrections to the inertial navigation systems onboard Polaris submarines. A number of methods were developed for acquiring position fixes on the submarines, but the leader was Transit, the first operational satellite-based navigation system. The system relied on measuring the radio signals transmitted by Transit satellites. Systems onboard the submarines extracted navigational fixes from the shapes of the received doppler curves. Processing this complex doppler data required digital computers, which were at the time still typically room-sized machines. To bring this capability onboard submarines, researchers designed a pioneering and influential minicomputer. Introduced in 1961 by Ramo-Wooldridge, the TRW-130 was designated as the AN/UYK-1 by the Navy. It is famous as the first computer small enough to fit through a submarine hatch, partly thanks to specially rounded corners. It could process the satellite's orbital parameters and doppler data to generate a position fix in about fifteen minutes. In size and shape it was quite similar to its contemporary the DEC PDP-1. The first photo here seems to be one of the only images easily available, and shows a programmer's card at the Smithsonian. There's no evidence of one of these machines being at UT, but there are other less direct connections. [1]

Los Angeles based TRW and its precursor Ramo-Wooldridge were where David Young was working on numerical computing when UT Austin hired him away in 1958 to become director of the Computation Center. Within the geographic corridor of Los Angeles, TRW and RAND functioned as a symbiotic intellectual relay. RAND utilized game theory and strategic forecasting to establish the mathematical requirements for nuclear deterrence, while TRW served as the technical architect responsible for translating those requirements into physical hardware. They shared DNA, geography, and a special relationship with the Air Force. Both acted more like universities than like traditional aerospace companies. When Bernard Schriever was deciding who should manage the ICBM program, he explicitly rejected using traditional airframe manufacturers, noting that existing industrial organizations "generally lack the across-the-board competence in the physical sciences". TRW’s headquarters in Inglewood was colloquially known as the Schoolhouse and provided the necessary cultural and technical infrastructure for the application of Young’s SOR method, treating the digital computer as a laboratory for physics simulations. This was the corporate culture that produced the TRW-130.

The long story of the Transit navigation satellite system was interwoven with the story of computional modeling and simulation at UT Austin, particularly the story of UT aerospace from around 1960 onward and what evolved into the Center for Space Research. An important focus of Byron Tapley and Bob Schutz’s research was the Transit system and the quality of the orbital information being uploaded to the Transit satellites. Schutz became one of Tapley’s earliest coworkers and was deeply involved with implementation of their research on the UT Computation Center CDC 6600, Cyber, and Cray. The 6600 arrived in 1966 while he was a grad student, and he certainly ranked as an expert user of the 60-bit systems at UT, with roughly twenty years of experience from the arrival of the 6600, through the follow-on Cyber era, and then the Cray in the eighties. He developed a special geopotential formulation and other algorithmic innovations to take advantage of the computing hardware for specific improvements in applied gravity field modeling.

Their work aimed to improve the system's accuracy and extend it for use in scientific and geodetic applications. The system relied on the satellites broadcasting their own known orbit, and the Navy had to continually track the satellites from the ground and upload fresh orbital ephemerides and clock corrections twice per day. This limitation is what ultimately drove the continuous push for better gravitational models and advanced orbit determination techniques. The upload data was generated by the Transit system’s ground stations. This ground segment was the brain that kept the Transit system accurate. Tracking stations like the one operated by UT Austin at McMurdo Station Antarctica, along with a similar station in Thule Greenland, were strategic assets. Because the Transit satellites flew in polar orbits, these high-latitude ground stations were able to observe and track every pass of every Transit satellite. Every time a Transit satellite passed overhead, the stations recorded the doppler shift of its signal. During the seventies, Station 019 at McMurdo was typically staffed by electrical engineering graduate and undergraduate students from UT Austin, who operated the equipment out of a small quonset hut. The station measured the doppler shifts, transferred the raw tracking data onto 5-hole paper tape, and then transmitted it via commercial and military teleprinter networks.

Los Angeles based TRW precursor Ramo-Wooldridge circa 1958. This was around the time of David Young's departure for UT Austin, and work on the TRW-130 minicomputer was underway. 

UT Austin's Transit Station 019 at McMurdo Antarctica in the seventies.

Station 019's control room, with the radios for measuring Transit satellite doppler data.

Bob Schutz and Byron Tapley, center left and right, at UT Austin. Almost certainly in WRW, the old aerospace building.

[1] Note from the Smithsonian at TRW-130 AN/UYK-1 Digital Computer Coding Card . This code card assisted with the programing of TRW-130 computers made by Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc. It includes the octal and decimal equivalents for common logand codes. The word “logand” was a computer acronym for “logical command” the intermediate level programming language planned in the design of the TRW-130 computer. The donor, who programmed TRW-130 computers, shares the following: “Logan programming allowed assembly languages to be developed for specific applications. … . Most programmers never saw the logans because they used one of these specialized assembly languages. I did most of my programming in logans, however. The logan code was extremely difficult. One had to understand how the machine operated at the flip-flop and gate level. Each instruction was at the clock level and one had to understand what the hardware was doing at each clock cycle. If you made a mistake, the error was difficult to find. The machine basically went nuts. It started doing things that it was never supposed to do. Every bit configuration in the machine was executable. One could easily create a function which you had no idea what would happen. It was not unusual to make a mistake that caused the machine to branch into data, and since every bit configuration was executable, the machine would start executing data thinking it was instructions.” 

L5 Society at UT Austin

Gerard O'Neill's advocacy for settling the High Frontier inspired the formation of the L5 Society in 1975, and was soon reflected at UT Austin and McDonald Observatory in West Texas. As described in The Visioneers, The University of Texas in Austin, for instance, hosted an active chapter that met regularly. Harlan Smith, an astronomy professor with a passion for popularizing science, was a member and later served on L5’s board of directors. Another member, Deborah Byrd, soon started writing and producing StarDate, an Austin-based telephone message service that, in 1978, became a nationally syndicated radio segment on space and astronomy topics. ... It is difficult to construct an exact and detailed demographic picture of the L5 Society’s membership. But evidence shows that it was especially strong in California, Washington, Texas, and Arizona, states that were part of the postwar “Gunbelt,” where the nation’s defense contractors were concentrated. As one would expect, there were more extensive pockets of support near universities and centers of aerospace activity. [1]

Many from that era remember The High Frontier, the Whole Earth Catalog, StarDate, and Music from the Hearts of Space. Dave Ahl's Creative Computing can easily be added to that list. All very useful to keep in mind in the context of the HRC DEC-10 from 1975 to 1982.

Interesting list of L5 members on the upper-left, including UT and McDonald Observatory's Harlan Smith.

Classic image of the interior of an O'Neill Cylinder.

[1] McCray, W. Patrick. The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

[2] O’Neill, Gerard K. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1977.

[3] The L5 Society was directly inspired by Gerard O'Neill and founded in 1975 by the Hensons in Tucson. The Visioneers gives an interesting description, The Hensons were an energetic and opinionated (some detractors also used words like aggressive and abrasive) couple who shared a pronounced enthusiasm for science fiction writers like Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Like many other young American couples their age, the Hensons, whether for philosophical or financial reasons, strove to be more self-sufficient. Their rambling house, located just off the university campus, had a large garden and was home to an array of chickens, goats, and rabbits. The Hensons’ house offered visitors unconventional entertainment options. A network of underground tunnels ran beneath it and, instead of a television, the Hensons built a Tesla coil that created entertaining displays of electrical sparks. Meanwhile, the open desert spaces around Tucson allowed them to indulge a fondness for recreational explosives by reenacting scenes from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with homemade pyrotechnic devices. [1]

[4] Both the L5 Society, active from the mid-70s through the 1980s, and Music from the Hearts of Space, launching on KPFA in 1973 and nationally in 1983, emerged from the same countercultural and futurist West Coast milieu. The ethereal, expansive electronic and ambient soundscapes curated by host Stephen Hill provided an unofficial sonic backdrop for the burgeoning space migration, orbital settlement, and futurist philosophy championed by L5 activists. Listeners of late-night public radio in the 1970s and 1980s frequently overlapped with early space colonization advocates, blending atmospheric listening habits with high-tech optimism about Lagrange point habitats.

[5] For a fictional idea of life on the High Frontier, especially in O'Neill Cylinders, two intertwined scifi collections are highly recommended. Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix collection, and William Gibson's Sprawl collection, Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive in particular. There are intentional connections between the worlds in both collections, especially with regard to the construction and centuries-long evolution of O'Neill Cylinders, with the Schismatrix stories set in the far-future, long after the near-future Sprawl stories. Sterling is an Austinite, and Gibson a repeat guest. A good question is how much contact there was with the UT Austin L5 Society. It's even possible that Sterling was to some extent aware of Decwar, as he was an early personal computer and BBS user, as discussed in 1992's The Hacker Crackdown.

[6] Additional note, a week later. Was reading the appendix of O'Neill's High Frontier and found the following. Anyone remotely associated with UT aerospace knows about Hans Mark's role after his 1984 arrival in Austin. He is the aerospace counterpart to Harlan Smith in UT astronomy. In September 1974 I gave a colloquium-lecture at Ames, and for the first time met the director of the laboratory, Dr. Hans Mark (later Undersecretary of the Air Force in the Carter Administration).  Dr. Mark, a physicist who spent the early part of his career in nuclear physics of a military nature, has the reputation of working at least six days a week, of always arriving at work at 7:30 A.M., and of leaving the laboratory in the evening only long after everyone else but the night shift has gone.  It was a pleasure to talk to him, and we soon arranged that we would "bootleg" a brief but intense research effort on space colonization by choosing that as the topic of the 1975 NASA Ames/Stanford University Summer Study.  That study, one of an annual series supported by NASA and held in cooperation with the American Society of Engineering Education, was already funded, and the director of the laboratory was free to choose its topic each year.

Symbolic Interactive Matrix Processing Language and MATLAB

Student oriented software became a focus at UT from 1971, championed by faculty such as John Allen, Joseph Lagowski, and George Culp. The efforts centered in the Project Computer-Based Education office in the aerospace building, still referred to as the Engineering Sciences Building at the time but changed to WRW soon after. The project was a high-level initiative at UT Austin, researching how students learn through computer-assisted instruction and designed as a five-year curriculum development effort, 1971 through 1975, involving seventy-five professors and over 4,000 students in the creation of classroom modules. 

Probably the most significant artifact of the instructional ecosystem was the Symbolic Interactive Matrix Processing Language, or Simple, a direct ancestor of the commercial Matlab environment still common in engineering today. Conceived as a conversational, matrix-oriented programming language, Simple was designed as a bridge for beginners in engineering who needed to work with sophisticated matrix calculations despite minimal prior computational experience. The focus was on computer-based teaching techniques in undergraduate science and engineering education and transforming the teaching of linear algebra and numerical analysis. It was generally used via remote terminals, specifically acoustically coupled Datapoint terminals and standard teletypes, which allowed students to bypass the delays of traditional batch computing. It included a Teach command that was central to the instructional shift, providing self-paced, inquiry-based documentation that enabled students to obtain quick results and proceed at their own rate. For the mature user in aerospace or structural engineering, Simple provided rigorous tools for complex operations, including essential matrix decompositions. By accommodating both batch and timesharing modes, Simple ensured its own survival and grounded high-level engineering research in a versatile, interactive everyday tool. 

The workaday success of Simple and Matlab has demonstrated the real-world value of this type of code. Despite a distinct lack of glamour and hype, they endure because they reflect a deep connection between engineering and computational modeling and simulation. This special corner of the software world and its particular links to the engineering world are well worth further exploration. A quote from Matlab’s creator Cleve Moler captures this, here he's discussing the course he taught at Stanford circa 1980. 

The computer science students and numerical students were not very impressed. This was not a sophisticated language, they were taking courses from Don Knuth and John McCarthy, and so on, who did real computer science. There was not much mathematics going on here, these algorithms were old, traditional algorithms, there was no convergence theory, no partial differential equations, this was not the usual fare for the graduate course in matrix computation. The other half of the students in that class were students that had come from various departments in engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering, they knew about matrices, they’d used matrices a lot in their theoretical work, many of their textbooks described things in terms of matrices. They had done computation with matrices using Fortran. Some of them knew about LINPACK and EISPACK, when they saw MATLAB they thought this was terrific.

Moler created Matlab in the mid seventies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and it would be good to learn how much influence Simple had on the beginnings of Matlab. There were definite connections between UT and New Mexico, particularly in the context of White Sands and Los Alamos. 

Aerospace building before it was renamed WRW. Engineering Laboratories, completed 1960. Home of Project Computer-Based Education.

Former site of WRW, lower center.

[1] Oral History Interview with Cleve Moler.

[2] 1972 Project C-BE article in the Alcade.

[3] 1976 Creative Computing article mentioning Project C-BE.

Houston and Austin

The subsurface modeling techniques developing in Houston were naturally addressed as part of David Young’s UT Austin course on numerical analysis, where Mary Wheeler first began working with them on the UT CDC 1604 in the early sixties. Dynamic partial differential equations are used to model transient time-varying physical processes, with the classic example being the two-dimensional heat flow equation. In the realm of computational geosciences, these equations are used to model and simulate transient fluid flow and transport through porous media, predicting how oil, gas, or groundwater move over time. Solving these massive, multidimensional time-dependent equations with early computers was difficult until the Alternating Direction Implicit method was created to break them down into simpler, one-dimensional steps. Wheeler dedicated her 1963 master's thesis at UT to rigorously analyzing the mathematical properties of ADI, which had been developed a decade earlier by Douglas, Rachford, and Donald Peaceman at Exxon precursor Humble Oil to solve PDEs on the severely memory-constrained IBM CPC. [1][2]

Wheeler's work at UT served as an introduction to Henry Rachford and Jim Douglas, both of whom had transitioned from Humble Oil to Rice and made it a center for the computational modeling and simulation associated with the oil industry. Rachford served as Wheeler's doctoral advisor at Rice. Under his guidance, she moved into the field of subsurface flow problems, discovering a passion for environmental applications that would define her career. Her work at Rice was also guided by Douglas, who recognized her analytical skills and became a lifelong mentor. They were establishing the computational foundations for simulating fluid flow in underground porous media and their mentorship was the defining influence on Wheeler's career trajectory and research philosophy. She frequently cited them as the fathers of the field who taught her the importance of combining theoretical depth with practical utility. Together, this group became one of the most influential teams in numerical analysis during the seventies, coauthoring significant papers, such as research on superconvergence and procedures for flux modeling. 

These were important connections between computing at UT Austin, Exxon, Rice, and Houston. Mary Wheeler became involved at UT in the early sixties before moving to Rice, and then returning to UT in the nineties. Another sign was the story of how Humble Oil donated its IBM CPC to UT in 1958. UT’s Al Matsen was a consultant for Exxon Houston and New Jersey for over thirty-five years. The CPC was a landmark gift and a direct result of Matsen’s extensive ties. To bypass bureaucratic paperwork, Matsen, his graduate students, and other faculty physically carried the heavy components into Welch Hall and installed it themselves. Exxon had acquired the CPC in 1952 and used it heavily for creation of the ADI techniques. 

The history of SOR Successive Over-Relaxation and the work of David Young at TRW and UT was focused on fluid and heat flows for atmospheric reentry vehicles. At the same time, ADI and the work of Peaceman, Rachford, and Douglas in Houston was focused on fluid and heat flows for the oil industry. The nature of the modeling and the computing hardware was similar, the approaches involved in ADI and SOR were complementary. Mary Wheeler was a direct bridge between the two, beginning with David Young in Austin in the early sixties, moving over to Houston and ADI for several decades, then returning to Austin in the nineties.

Mary Wheeler

Henry Rachford and the IBM CPC at Exxon precursor Humble Oil in Houston, circa 1953.

David Young

[1] Wonderful retrospective about Rachford, Douglas, Peaceman, and ADI in Houston. 

[2] Retrospective on Mary Wheeler's career.

[3] Numerical Linear Algebra special edition dedicated to David Young. Note especially the context around Charles Warlick.

David's first job after graduating from Harvard was as an Applied Mathematician in the Computing Laboratory of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, during 1950–1951. His fellow co-workers included Samuel Conte, Charles Warlick, and Mario Juncosa, among others. During this time, David and Mildred purchased their first new house, and had their first son, William David. At that time, Aberdeen Proving Ground contained one of the largest collections of electronic computers in the U.S. They were employed in the Ballistics Research Laboratory, primarily for the calculation of bombing and firing tables. Some of the computers that were being used at BRL included the ENIAC, which was the first general- purpose electronic computer, the ORDVAC, which was designed by John von Neumann who often visited Aberdeen Proving Ground, the EDVAC, which was a rotating drum computer, and a Bell Laboratory paper tape-driven computer. David Young and Charles Warlick worked on the ORDVAC computer using Richardson's method on a 21 x 21 grid, which required writing a tricky computer program, at that time, because the machine had a total memory of only 1024 40-bit words with no external memory. 

The University of Texas in Austin wanted to establish a Computation Center. Professor Robert Greenwood, and others from the Department of Mathematics, wrote to David, inviting him to come to Texas. At first, David dismissed the offer, because he considered Texas to be an outback area of the country. Eventually, he decided to go and take a look for himself. He was pleasantly surprised to find that Austin was quite a nice city, with a river, hills, and oak trees, as well as having a good university. Lou Ehrlich followed David from Maryland to California to Texas, and became his first PhD student in 1963. In the summer of 1958, David moved his family to Austin-he would spend the rest of his career there. David and Mildred's third child, Carolyn Ellen, was born in Austin.

In the Fall of 1958, David brought Bob Gregory to Texas to join him as a member of the mathematics faculty, and to help him set up the Computation Center-which was almost non-existent. David, Bob, and a secretary shared an office next to the computer room. The first computer was an IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine, which was the world's first mass-produced computer. During the next several years, Young and Gregory purchased new computers, expanded the staff, and designed a new building for the Center, which was built partially underground near the University tower. In 1965, David asked Charles Warlick to move to Austin, and to help him run the expanding operations of the Computation Center.

Under David's leadership, The University of Texas not only built a new Computation Center building, but also acquired two large supercomputer systems-the CDC 1604 computer in 1960, and the CDC 6600 computer in 1966. Gregory was particularly interested in the CDC computers because of their long 60 bit word length. Based on his reputation, David obtained the first $400,000 grant, from the National Science Foundation, toward the purchase of the CDC 1604 computer, which was one of the first transistorized computers. The CDC 6600 supercomputer, which was one of the largest and fastest computers at that time, was purchased with the help of the first NSF million dollar equipment grant.

Tape Bridge Into The DEC-10

The skeleton of the Decwar-playing robots is turning out to have other uses. It's now also the skeleton of an automated Tape Bridge between the local system and the DEC-10, in action within Project UTEXAS as tape.py in the msc folder.

The tape.py code automatically copies files from the local filesystem into the DEC-10 filesystem. It's as quick and simple as possible, for doing fast iterations around editing local files using modern tools and then smoothly syncing those edits onto the DEC-10. It's almost a fully automated filesystem sync between the local system and the DEC-10, and in fact could be made into such by scheduling periodic runs. It runs in the Docker container where the DEC-10 lives. The container is effectively an intermediary environment between the local system and the DEC-10. The local files are available live within the container and tape.py sees and copies them there. To use tape.py, work within a terminal session connected to the container. To schedule periodic runs for example, do that in the container, not in the local system. This is necessary because the tape drive and the mounted tape live in the container as part of the DEC-10, not in the local system. In other words, the hardware is in the container. The tape exists as a .tap file within the container's environment, and meanwhile the local system is simply a place for using modern tools to edit source code.

Execution begins in the container, where tape.py creates a temporary folder and copies in all necessary files. It then executes back10, named after the DEC-10 backup utility, to convert the temporary folder into a tape image with the TOPS-10 tape format. This step generates a standard tape archive .tap file and verifies its integrity by listing its contents. If tape.py is executed with a --simple argument it terminates here, leaving the tape ready for use, and this is in fact the route taken during startup of the container when the tape is initially mounted on the drive. There is one tape mounted on the drive from container startup onwards. What tape.py can do at any time is replace the contents of the tape. One tape, many writes to it, many restores from it within the DEC-10. This one tape is the bridge between the local filesystem and the DEC-10, and many files can pass over it at various times during its lifetime. More tape drives and tapes are possible. One alone is minimalist simplicity.

When not in --simple mode the code transitions into the restoration phase, utilizing the pexpect library to establish a programmatic telnet connection to the DEC-10. With pexpect, the code sends text and monitors terminal output for expected responses. To the DEC-10 the code is indistinguishable from a human user telnetting in. The code is a robot and the overall setup is a kind of Turing Test. As long as the robot acts like a human, everything is fine. This system was developed from late 2024 for the Decwar-playing robots. The full Decwar robots are more complex, but the essential skeleton was directly adapted into tape.py in roughly an hours work. The robot opens a telnet connection and logs in, then uses the standard TOPS-10 tape utility BACKUP to restore from the tape. The tape.py code here is actually a guide on how to use BACKUP, for whenever a restore needs to be done manually. It then gracefully logs out and closes the telnet connection.