To save the world or end it, time will tell
—James Merrill,
“Under Libra: Weights and Measures,”
fromBraving the Elements
Prologue
September 1994
They came to Boston from as far away as London and Los Angeles, several dozen
middle-aged men, reuniting for a fall weekend in 1994 to celebrate what they had done
twenty-five years earlier. These were the scientists and engineers who had designed and
built theARPANET, the computer network that revolutionized communications and gave
rise to the global Internet. They had worked in relative obscurity in the 1960s; a number
of them had been only graduate students when they made significant contributions to the
network. Others had been mentors. Most of them had never gained much recognition for
the achievement.
Bolt Beranek and Newman, a computer company based in Cambridge, had been their
center of gravity, had employed many of them, had built and operated the original ARPA
network, then slipped into relative obscurity as the Internet grew like a teeming city
around its earliest neighborhood. Now, a quarter-century after installing the first network
node, BBN had invited all of theARPANETpioneers to come together, hoping to heighten
its own profile by throwing a lavish celebration marking the anniversary.
Many of those at the reunion hadn’t seen one another or been in touch for years. As they
filtered into the lobby of the Copley Plaza for a Friday afternoon press conference
kicking off the celebration, they scanned the room for familiar faces.
Bob Taylor, the director of a corporate research facility in Silicon Valley, had come to
the party for old times sake, but he was also on a personal mission to correct an
inaccuracy of long standing. Rumors had persisted for years that theARPANEThad been
built to protect national security in the face of a nuclear attack. It was a myth that had
gone unchallenged long enough to become widely accepted as fact.
Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s
Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one
who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful
intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that
researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny,
