Introducing 'Computer Freaks' - Chapter One: The Dollhouse
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When I was a little girl, my dad built me a dollhouse. It was about 1981, and he had just retired from the military.

Night after night, after my brother and I had been put to bed, he'd head downstairs to build this three-story model of pure craftsmanship. He would let his rapidly vanishing strands of brown hair fall over his eyes. He'd smoke his pipe, blast Johann Sebastian Bach like it was ACDC, and hand-dye every single shingle on that dollhouse roof.

He cemented on wooden siding and painted the entire house sunshine yellow with hundreds of gentle brush strokes with his tongue sticking out, which is always what my dad does when he is concentrating. It was important to him that he made every detail of this dollhouse perfect for me. And I think that's because the other thing he built didn't turn out quite the way he wanted.

That other thing is the ARPANET. From 1979 to 1981, my dad, Major Joseph Hany, was the network manager for the ARPANET, which was the precursor to the internet. Without the ARPANET, the internet as we know it would not exist. But if he had it his way,

the internet would have never become the free and open place it is today. I don't think many people realize just how different a world we could have had if the founding of the internet had gone a different way. There are hundreds of people who are considered founding fathers of the internet, all with different notions of what the internet could or should be. They can't even agree on what moment to mark as its birth

or who actually deserves credit. I think it's partly because of all these battles that they held each other back from achieving the notoriety they deserve. None of these founding fathers have a city named after them like George Washington, or even a musical written about them like Alexander Hamilton.

And the seminal moments that do exist in the history of what's arguably the most important technology ever created are largely unknown to most people. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I want to tell you about my dad and who he is now. ♪

So let me take you back to a few days after Christmas last December. My husband and I drove up from New York to Arlington, Massachusetts with our two kids and of course their iPads to keep them busy. We visited my dad at the assisted living facility we moved him into last September. My husband is trying to keep our children under control while my dad tells me about an old coworker he just read about in the paper.

Wait, who was in the paper again? Vint Cerf. Vint Cerf was in the paper, in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, and he was, you know, very, I don't know, very formal. Yeah, yeah. The whole page. Yeah, the whole page. Yeah. Was he that formal when you worked with him? Yeah. He was that? Yeah. I try and call you, but...

I couldn't at the time. That's okay. I taped my phone number to the wall for you. Okay. See, it's right there. My dad has dementia, which is one of his many medical ailments he has that made us move him into assisted living. To be honest, things have been a bit of a shitshow lately. My mom passed away last year. Without her to care for, my father's purpose and drive to live is disappearing before my eyes.

His path from assisted living to memory care is happening at what feels like lightning speed. My life, which was already a blur of business trips and weekend soccer games, has now been filled with estate sellers trying to get rid of my father's mountains of tools and outdated technology. I can't say he's particularly happy to be in assisted living, but all things considered, it's a sweet and comfortable apartment.

We've lined the windowsill with framed photos of him and my mom. I look at them while my dad tells me about his former colleague in the paper.

Then my daughter reminds us of her presents. Don't yell. I'm going to have to distract them with some of their Christmas toys we brought with us. Don't yell. Please, why don't you play with your soldiers? And Elizabeth, why don't you show Grandpa Joe your new dollhouse furniture? Can you please do that? That dollhouse I told you about, the one my dad built me when I was a kid? Well, it's now been passed down to my daughter, Elizabeth. Okay.

For Christmas, Santa's elves refurbished the dollhouse for my daughter and bought her some updated furniture to fill its seven rooms. She may not sound as excited about this dollhouse as I am, but I promise you she loves it. And seeing her play with it reminds me so much of my childhood. So why did you build such a beautiful dollhouse? Why did you build me the dollhouse? Well, because I thought eventually it would be something.

Something that would be happy that people can look at. My dad's dementia is spreading faster than any of us expected. But talking about the dollhouse seems to physically relax him. Much more than what's going to happen today or even tomorrow. He remembers details about making my dollhouse with remarkable clarity. He's the same way when he talks about the ARPANET.

That's actually what I'm trying to talk to him about. My work is good, my work. I'm doing a project about you, Daddy. Oh, yeah? Yep. And wanted to ask you about the ARPANET. Oh. Okay. If my dad had gotten his way, preventing the free and open access to this technology like he argued for, there might not be an internet today at all, or at least not the same internet. To him, the ARPANET was like my dollhouse.

a work of art and something to be cherished, not something that, like today, has been plagued by identity thieves and anonymous trolls. You see, my dad wanted to preserve the ARPANET's original purpose of being a tool for the military only. He feared what would happen if the public could communicate so freely over the ARPANET with so few controls. As a journalist, I disagree with my dad on this.

I believe information should be accessible to everyone. But at the same time, I've been covering internet harm for years, especially the harm it can have on children. Maybe my dad had a point. And now that my dad is nearing the end of his life, I want to tell his side of the story and the real story behind the founding of the internet.

So me and my producers are going across the country and as far as Spain to talk to the founding fathers of the internet. To interview the people my father sits in his overheated room in Arlington, Massachusetts reminiscing about. To understand their intentions and their biggest regrets. Because I believe that if we try to understand the internet then, it can help us better understand the problems of the internet today.

This is Computer Freaks from Inc. Magazine. I'm Christine Hany Derbryan. Chapter 1: The Dollhouse Before we go any further, you need to know what the ARPANET actually is. There is an office in the Department of Defense called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. ARPA for short. The ARPANET is a network of computers that came out of ARPA. Get it?

But it wasn't the military who made the ARPANET what it became. It was nerds, engineers and graduate students at places like MIT, Harvard, UCLA, and Stanford that won Defense Department funding. ARPA needed the brightest scientific minds in the country to make the ARPANET a reality. But when more students joined the ARPANET, my dad feared the military could lose control.

I think a lot of people who worked in the universities wanted it free and open. And the guys that had a classified project wanted it kept shut for good reason. So the last thing my father did before he retired from the military in 1981 was send a memo. It spelled out his intentions for the ARPANET clearly.

It read, "Only military personnel may use the ARPANET." He said that any universities who allowed people not approved to be on the ARPANET would lose all access, which to him made sense because the ARPANET was a Department of Defense project from the start. He frankly wasn't very fond of these students. He even called these students in another memo "computer freaks," and that wasn't meant to be kind.

But why did the U.S. military want to build an ARPANET at all? Let me put this in a little bit of perspective. I'll do what I want to do as quick as I can. My dad began to tell me about the history of communication networks.

And in his typical fashion, he gave me way too much information. What you really need to go back is to ancient Egypt and whatever. I don't really need to take you back to ancient Egypt, so we can skip forward a bit. Let's start in the 20th century. ♪

And what happened was that over a period of time, between World War I and World War II, there were different agencies and firms which developed code machines.

Codes were essential to the military during World War II. You were probably aware of how important it was to be able to break the codes of our enemy. The most famous example of this was Alan Turing's work to decipher the German code, which was aptly named Enigma. But codes were also essential for the Allied forces' own communication. These code machines were used to develop messages that went back and forth between people.

After talking with my dad, as helpful as he was, I decided I wanted to talk to a historian about this. So I reached out to Anne Armstrong. A lot of the focus in World War II from a communications standpoint was the fact that security was critical. Anne is a historian for an agency under the Department of Defense where my dad used to work. The fact that the services...

had to work together for the first time, really, and were not on the same sheet of music. They weren't using the same languages and they weren't using the same communications technology, which was only growing. Let me just interrupt and ask, and they weren't on the same page like you're talking about in World War II or? Yes. Okay. Yes. Particularly in the Pacific, particularly as they were island hopping. So the Navy was critical in the Pacific and

And ship-to-ship communication and ship-to-shore communication, more importantly, ship back to Washington. And ship talking about secure communications and breaking the Japanese codes about what the Japanese plans were as they were communicating was very complicated and absolutely critical. And it needed work. What needed work in particular was what happens after you break a code.

How do you effectively act on that information, especially when there are so many other pieces of info going back and forth? One of the big problems with communication in the Pacific in particular, I don't know as much about the European theater, but I do about the Pacific theater. One of the things that was really critical was the priority of message traffic. If someone had broken a code on where the Japanese were going to land in a week,

That communication would get lost in the shuffle of what's for breakfast. Obviously, we were successful, if you look back at World War II, but we could do it better. While I definitely grew up hearing about the rivalries between the various military branches, it's hard to imagine a version of the U.S. military that's not the unified superpower it is today.

But as Anne said, this was the first time the different service branches had to work together like this, let alone the challenges of coordinating with allies. There was no central command of all armed forces the way there is today.

We have to understand that even the Department of Defense was not that old. The Department of Defense was created in, I believe, 1948. So after World War II, it was imperative that the U.S. streamline command and control. And they had to put money behind figuring out these communication issues, especially if they were going to win the next war, the Cold War.

With Europe decimated and the U.S. left as the only superpower to oppose the USSR, staying ahead of the Russians in military defense and technology was essential. This reality was made more urgent when this happened. Today, a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket. In 1957, the Soviet Union put the first satellite in the sky, Sputnik.

It was a huge blow to the U.S. during the Cold War. Our Russian rivals clearly beat us in this technological feat, and catching up became the biggest priority. You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the Earth-circling satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age. It was just a year after Sputnik was launched that the Department of Defense founded ARPA to solve these huge communication issues and the space race we were losing.

But President Eisenhower didn't want an agency filled with more military officials. He had just led a nation through a world war and was too wise to their rivalries and politics. He loved the brilliance and thinking done by scientists. If anyone wanted to keep the president happy, filling an agency with some of the most innovative scientific minds was the best path forward.

And one of those brilliant minds was a man named Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider.

or Lick for short. He was getting into computers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a time when computers took up full rooms just to crunch some numbers. Lick saw the possibility of a digital world, a future of online banking, electronic libraries, and the connection of all humans across the globe. It's Lick's vision that would be the inspiration for the ARPANET and become the blueprint for the internet we know today.

Computer Freaks is brought to you by Inc. Business Media. Inc. is here to support the American entrepreneur through its journalism, recognition programs like the Inc. 5000, live events like Inc. Founders House, and small peer-to-peer networking.

We aim to inform, educate, and elevate the profile of our community, the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who create our future. For more essential journalism like Computer Freaks, go to Inc.com and subscribe to Inc. Unlimited to experience the full offering of writing, video, and podcasts. I tend to believe that things are going to be considerably better for a lot of people

when and if we ever get changed over to an essentially electronic base. What you're hearing is the voice of J.C.R. Licklider in one of the few interviews with him ever recorded. It was filmed in 1972, more than a decade after he started at ARPA. By the 70s, Lick was revered by nearly everyone in the computer field. Some of his contemporaries even referred to him as a god. But he was really just a kid from Missouri.

Lick didn't have the background you would think for a computer scientist. He was the child of religious Midwesterners, Joseph and Margaret, who met at a Baptist youth revival.

As a child, Lick had a sunny disposition and an obsession with planes. His childhood bedroom looked like a lumber yard filled with wooden model plane parts. Like my dad, Lick loved to build things and get his hands dirty. As he grew older, his interest moved from model planes to cars. He had loved to work on cars. He would, however bad a wreck the thing was, he would buy a used car and fix it up so it would run.

That's Mitch Waldrop. He wrote a book about Lick called The Dream Machine. Licklider studied physics and mathematics as an undergrad, but psychology would become his passion. He got a master's in psychology and his PhD in psychoacoustics. He was fascinated by things like what happens if you close your eyes and ask someone to snap their fingers? How can your brain tell you where the snap is coming from?

or how at cocktail parties people can tune into certain conversations and tune out others. He had a thing for cocktail parties, and frankly, any place where he could engage in interesting conversations.

He and his wife really enjoyed new experiences. One of the ways that came out, as described to me, was that they hated to eat in the same restaurant twice. He was a big guy, according to his wife Louise, very handsome when he was younger. He always dressed pretty formally. He was not one for casual dressing. He would wear a coat and tie to work.

In his younger days, I believe he wore a bow tie. But he was very fastidious in his dress, meticulous in his note-taking, and he liked very sharp pencils for taking his notes. After finishing his degree, he was recruited to work on a project at Harvard, right around the time World War II was starting for the U.S. This was research funded by the Army Air Corps, now the Air Force,

on the effect of noise in airplanes. In other words, he studied how altitude affects the way that pilots communicate. He conducted experiments on B-17 and B-24 bombers in pressurized and below freezing conditions. He was focused on how humans experience technology and wanted to make sure that tech was easy for people to use.

The acoustic work he did during the war, through the war, gave him a very good appreciation of the fact that humans and machines need to work together, that the machines need to be designed for us. That is, how do you best adapt the machines and our technology to human beings, right?

as opposed to just handing the technology to people and saying, "Here it is, use it." So you're talking more about like almost the education of human beings through the technology, is that? Well, yes, that. But more than that, adapting, designing the technology from the start as best you could.

so that it's easier for people to use, make it hard to do the wrong thing, make it easy to do the right thing. Lick's human-first approach to technology, which was highly unique at the time, caught the attention of scientists Leo Baranek and Richard Bolt, who recruited him to work for the psychoacoustics department at MIT.

He later followed them when they started their own company, which became Bolt, Berenik and Neumann. It was around then that Lick had an epiphany about the way he worked. He calculated that roughly 85% of his working time was spent in clerical tasks and just finding information, or as he would put it, getting into a position to think. So why couldn't computers do those tasks?

The idea that computers could be something much more than gigantic adding machines, but could be much more, in his words, symbiotic with human beings. Lick called this man-computer symbiosis. He published a groundbreaking paper with the same title in March of 1960. I can't emphasize enough how much this kind of thinking had not been discussed before.

He wasn't clear on exactly how to do this. He just knew it was possible, that this was a goal that we should be working towards. It's kind of a bridge between the theoretical and the pragmatic is where he sat. That's Jack Haverty, one of Lick's protégés. Back when Jack was a graduate student at MIT, Jack always looked up to Lick. Here's how he describes him.

He basically looked like your typical grandfather. I was in my 20s at the time, so he was old, to me at least at that point. So he was sort of grandfatherly and he was not at all a dictatorial. He would talk about things. He wasn't so much a technologist. He understood technology, but he was more in a big picture kind of mode where he would talk about what you wanted to be able to do as opposed to how you would do it.

It was that big picture thinking that, in 1962, led the Defense Department to choose Lick to run an office at ARPA, dedicated to information technology. As you'll remember from the first part of this episode, ARPA needed to solve a major communication issue and keep up with the Russians. And Lick's vision for man-computer symbiosis could help.

He understood the psychology aspect of people interacting and he understood computers, especially to the extent of he could see where they were going to go. So he wasn't limited to what we could do right now with computers. He was thinking about what we will be able to do as computers evolve. And that vision extended not just to one single computer, but the idea was you could have computers all over the place.

that we're all somehow talking to each other and doing stuff that help people do whatever it is they're doing. While working for ARPA, Lick was very much focused on this idea that computers could talk to each other, that people in New York could collaborate instantaneously with people in San Francisco. This was known as Lick's intergalactic network, a whole network of computers working symbiotically with man and with each other.

He had a notion of what computers could do, maybe not today, but someday. And he instilled that kind of feeling in all the students that were around.

This vision of the intergalactic network would inspire ARPA to invest in building the ARPANET. It would inspire generations of computer nerds like Jack Haverty to build on Lick's ideas. And it would become the cornerstone for the internet we have today that now does expand across the galaxy.

Lick left his job at ARPA in 1964, before the ARPANET became a reality. He left his work in the hands of colleagues he thought capable of realizing his vision, and he left with a firm belief that this Department of Defense office could be a force for good. Here's Mitch Waldrop again. Licklider, like virtually everyone in his generation, was a man of his word.

saw the US as the defender of democracy and indeed civilization. But the grad students he mentored, who would actually be the ones to use the ARPANET and build upon the technology, didn't share all of Lick's beliefs. The counterculture, in terms of its lifestyle, you could argue had an effect on the grad students who were basically building the ARPANET

This is the 1960s in the United States. The civil rights movement is underway, and the U.S. is entering into another war. This next generation is growing disillusioned and distrustful of government. But despite this growing anti-government sentiment in the 60s and early 70s, grad students were still signing up to work on DOD-funded projects, like the ARPANET, to

to work on Lick's vision, rationalizing it like: What we're doing with the networking and the computing is a liberation technology.

We're setting people's minds free. We're democratizing information. And we're using the Pentagon's money to do something subversive and cool. There was, at the very least, a level of indifference. I talked to Jack Haverty about his work on the ARPANET and how he rationalized working on technology developed for military purposes. He had this analogy that I found illuminating.

I wrote a little thing, email message, I guess, years ago where I talked about the elephant.

And the elephant, what I was referring to there was it's an old story about how a bunch of blind people are introduced to an elephant by walking into a room where the elephant is and they get to feel the elephant. And by feeling the elephant, they can describe what kind of animal they're talking about. And depending on which piece of the elephant you touch, you get a totally different view of what the elephant actually is.

The analogy then is that in the case of the ARPANET, the project itself could be viewed from many different perspectives. So somebody might view it as a project to share resources. So it's purely a cost sharing, cost saving kind of effort.

Others, for example, the people at MIT would view it as a wonderful research tool for how to do investigations into things like queuing theory and the mathematics of large systems. There's a psychological aspect to it where all of a sudden it's a social experiment, it's a social laboratory in

How do people interact when all of a sudden they can work over computers talking to each other sitting in their offices as opposed to all having to go to a conference and get together in a room? So there are a bunch of different views of that same elephant that different people had. And that's why I think you get lots of different perspectives on

why the ARPANET was built and what it was doing. So the sense I get, and I've been thinking quite a bit about your elephant analogy and also how you referenced it in your blog post, it was so almost kind of compartmentalized that there was a certain level of ignorance among all the different people working on the different parts of the elephant. I wouldn't so much call it ignorance. It was partly just a lack of awareness and also partly a lack of interest.

There was a lot of different kind of interests represented in the communities on the ARPANET, and people were aware that the others were going on, but they didn't really delve into what those people were actually doing. They were just another group on the net sharing resources. Whether anti-war students were justifying their work for ARPA as subversion or just trying not to think about the DoD connection, they all were interested in furthering Lick's vision.

It was because of Lick that the students my dad wanted to keep off the ARPANET were clamoring to get on in the first place. I know better than anyone what it's like to clamor for something my dad says is off limits. Lick ultimately returned to ARPA briefly in 1974, but the second time around, he found himself buried in requests for relevancy memos to prove the worth of the research he was doing.

Government was less willing to just write blank checks for projects, especially those carried out by a bunch of students. The relationship between military and academia had understandably grown more tense. Lick had become more frustrated with government bureaucracy.

But he never stopped believing in the long-term development of computing. He wrote a chapter in a book called "The Computer Age" in 1979, affirming these beliefs. By then, he was back at MIT, where he would finish his career.

The computer technology has been moving in a way that nothing else people have ever known has moved. Here's a field that gets a thousand times as good in 20 years. At MIT, his students basked in his enthusiasm for computing as the campus started to fill with computers everywhere you looked. His students described him as having this glow around him as he sat and worked before a computer late into the night.

Lick would retire in 1985 and spend the rest of his life living in Massachusetts with his wife Louise. Until one night in June of 1990, he'd returned from a road trip with her. He went upstairs to their rambling Arlington home, called for his wife, and collapsed. He died that same month in a nearby hospital, a hospital that has since been torn down and replaced with the assisted living facility

where my dad lives now. While reporting this story and spending time with my father in this very same place where Lick spent his final moments, I can't help but wonder what J.C.R. Licklider would think about his intergalactic network today. He lived before Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook. He lived before ordering library books on Kindle and doing all of his banking on an iPhone.

For someone who loved dining out at new restaurants, he never got to write an enthusiastic Yelp review. This guy would have loved sharing a million pictures of his travels and his family,

He never even got to text his wife, "I love you." And he never got to see how much his vision has transformed our economy. Thousands and thousands of businesses have been launched because of his vision. Huge tech companies in Silicon Valley to smaller startups in the heartland selling their crafts on Etsy. Basically, he never got to do any of the things that billions of people do every day on his intergalactic network.

or appreciate its awesome impact on how we live today. He left behind an unfinished internet, pieces of technology his students' generation would be left to build and pass on. In some ways, my dad is not so different from Lick. They both had a vision of what networking should be. My dad's vision was a more exclusive network because to him, creating technology was like building any great work of craftsmanship, like my dollhouse.

piece by piece, shingle by shingle, built with the hope of perfection. Made to be appreciated rather than taken for granted. Did you ever think that I would be sitting here doing everything that the ARPANET did on my phone here with you? No. As I've said, there are many founding fathers of the internet, all working on their own individual pieces.

Do they wish those pieces came together differently? I didn't think I would be made up of pieces like it is. And I like to think that, I guess I would like to think that I put pieces together on the art binette and let you folks see what, hey, this is it. My dad put the pieces together, and what he saw scared him. Grandpa Joe saw the pieces, okay? That's what I think about now.

My dad saw something coming. On the upcoming episodes, I will speak to people all over the world trying to track down the founding fathers of the ARPANET and ultimately the internet, starting with four names my father gave me. Len Kleinrock, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Jake Feinler.

That led me across the nation literally knocking on doors. Many of these men, and it is mostly men, are like my father dealing with their own mortality. So I caught them between doctor's appointments, being fitted for canes, and chemo sessions. You would be surprised how much these 70, 80, and even 90-year-olds are holding on to their long-held grudges and accusations. Many of them will try to set the record in their favor before it is too late.

This is a feisty bunch you're about to meet, so hold on. Computer Freaks is a production of Inc., created and hosted by myself, Christine Haney Dare-Brien. Our executive producer and editor is Josh Christensen. Associate producer is Sophie Codner. Music by James Jackman. Sound design and mixing by Nicholas Torres. Computer Freaks is dedicated to my dad, Major Joseph Haney.