Success has many fathers, says the old adage, but failure is an orphan. The Internet may be an unruly child, but it is proving no exception to the general rule. This month sees the 30th anniversary of the ARPANET, the first packet-switched network and the precursor of today's Internet. As it gradually dawns on the world that the Net might be the most significant change in mankind's communications environment since the invention of print, we are beginning to see unseemly jostling for the title of "father of the Internet".
Various people who were involved in the creation of the original two networks are making extraordinary claims on their personal websites. And the PR machines of their various organisations are busily stirring the pot.
This month 30 years ago, the first two nodes of the ARPANET were connected. One was in Leonard Kleinrock's lab at UCLA, the other at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park near San Francisco. Kleinrock's website (millennium.cs.ucla.edu/) has a nice photograph of him standing alongside the first Interface Message Processor or IMP - as the nodes were called. The site describes Kleinrock as "the inventor of the Internet technology".
Hmmm . . . Kleinrock was indeed one of the team which created the ARPANET. The first IMP was installed in his lab because he was an expert in network measurement (and indeed had written a pioneering study of message-switching networks in the early 1960s). He was doubtless heavily involved in the development of that first network, and in the technical discussions which led to the evolution of the Internet. But it was not Kleinrock but one of his graduate students, Vinton Cerf, who - together with Bob Kahn of ARPA - came up with the idea of TCP as a way of linking disparate networks into one seamless "inter-network".
So are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn the real "fathers of the Internet"? Here again the picture is murky. It's indisputable that they were the authors of the 1974 technical paper setting out the bones of the TCP internetworking idea. But it transpires that a team of researchers at Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had been working on the same lines unbeknownst to Cerf and Kahn and may even have beaten them to the punch. PARC was where the Ethernet local area networking system was invented (along with the graphical interface, the laser printer and much else besides). For very early on, PARC had had lots of local networks of different kinds and had to confront the problem of how to link them all together into one laboratory-wide system. The Xerox researchers came up with PUP - PARC Universal Packets - an idea very similar to TCP, and participated in the discussions which led to the metamorphosis of TCP into the TCP/IP family of protocols which underpins the Net.
But because they were under the thumb of Xerox corporate lawyers to keep quiet about how much "inter-networking " had been accomplished at PARC, they never received much credit for their role in the evolution of the Net.
Then there's the case of Donald Davies, the British scientist who invented packet-switching. In late 1965, Davies - who was head of computing at Britain's National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, near London - began to ponder the mismatch between the communications needs of computers and the telephone system which had evolved to serve the needs of voice traffic. The telephone system was a circuit-switching one - it used manual or automatic switches to create actual circuits between callers. Such circuits were slow to set up and expensive because nobody else could use the circuit while the callers were online. Most of the "conversations" which took place between computers, on the other hand, consisted of bursts followed by long periods of silence. They were therefore a very wasteful use of telephone capacity.
In a few evenings in November 1965, Davies came up with a solution - what he christened packet-switching. This involved chopping messages into short, uniform blocks with headers containing information about source and destination and devising a network of interconnected switches which routed packets from on to another until they reached their destinations.
In the spring of 1966, Davies gave a lecture on this idea to the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London and afterwards was approached by a man from the Ministry of Defence who told him that the work sounded very similar to some earlier work by a chap called Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. Up to that moment, Davies had never heard of him.
In fact Baran had come up with the same idea five years earlier. He was working on the design of survivable communications networks and had decided that what was needed was a digital, packet-switching system with a degree of redundancy between switches to ensure that the system could function even if degraded by a nuclear strike. He called his message fragments "information blocks", but essentially they were packets. The strangest thing of all is that the folks at ARPA, the Pentagon agency which funded the ARPANET, knew nothing of Baran's work - and indeed were told about it by the British.
So is Baran the "father of the Internet"? Or should he share paternity with Donald Davies? The interesting thing is that both of these men - the ones who have the best claim to the title - are irredeemably modest. Neither has a website asserting paternity, and Baran thinks the whole idea is daft. "The process of technological development," he once said, "is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying 'I built a cathedral' . . . The reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else."
A Brief History of the Future, John Naughton's history of the Internet, has recently been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. See www.briefhistory.com for details.