BBN 20-1 "BBN" Frank Heart Interview August 22, 1994/Tape Number 20 -- CARIBINER GROUP (TONE) (OFF MIKE) QUESTION Okay, urn, Frank, uh, why don't we start, uh, have you tell me who you are, your name and what your function was back in the late sixties. FRANK HEART Okay. Well, uh, my name is Frank Heart and, uh, I, uh, came to BBN in, uh, late 1966, uh, to, uh, help rescue a ... a somewhat in-trouble project and, uh, was there for a couple years, uh, before I, uh, first heard about the possibility of the ARPANET. (OFF MIKE) QUESTION When you first heard about the ARPANET, and ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-2 the ARPA project that they've ... when ... what ... what were you thinking? FRANK HEART Well, I mean, I didn't think a lot about it right at the beginning. Uh, it was a sunny, bright day on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City and, uh, I was at, uh, the Spring Joint Computer Conference. This is a ... you know, the kind of place that lots of people go to learn about what's going on and mostly to meet their friends. And I was walking the Boardwalk and talked to Larry Roberts. And, uh, he mentioned that iA,,rthur was considering, uh, building a network, uh, and that there was going to later that year be an RFP. This was in the spring of, uh, of '68. And, uh, I was interested in that and asked him a few questions and then he disappeared. And that was my first, uh, you know, knowledge at all about the possibility of the network. I had not been working with ARPA at all up till that time. ----------------------------------------------------------- , BBN 20-3 QUESTION When you started finding out about what they wanted to do and why they wanted to do it ... can you reflect on ... on what your thinking was at that time? FRANK HEART Well, Ithink that, uh, ARPA was hoping to be able to interconnect some of the research centers that it was already supporting. They were putting up a lot of money for people to have computers at various universities. And the idea of a network was that people at one university could take advantage of work that was being done at others, and that, uh, the people could share resources and, uh, I think they may have had the idea that they could save some money by letting people at have-not universities, uh, make use of machines that existed at have universities. Uh, I don't think that was perhaps the major idea, but it was one of the thoughts ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-4 that went to them. But I don't think at that point I did have very much knowledge about what it was for. Idon't think anybody, uh, had much knowledge about what it was for. It was an experiment. ARPA was in the business of, uh, doing high risk, uh, experiments in computer science and this was, uh, this was another experiment that ARPA was considering attempting. I don't think, uh, people at least at that stage thought about it at all as to what .it might really be for in the longer run. QUESTION Uh, when you read the, uh, the specs, did you think it was possible? Did you think it would be important? Did you think this was a hairbrained scheme? Imean, what were your thoughts? FRANK HEART Well, I think that, uh, BBN, once it heard about the possibility of the network, you know, began to try to think about it in advance of receiving ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-5 the actual request for proposals. And so by the time the request for proposal arrived, uh, we were, uh, you know, uh, very, very interested in the thing and, uh, we, uh, we decided it was a great opportunity. We decided that it might be very difficult for a small company like BBN to, uh, have a chance at that. But, uh, we looked at it very hard and decided that maybe it would be possible for us to work on it. We were very fortunate. We had a set of people that had had a great deal of experience from, uh, their days at Lincoln Laboratory in connecting, uh, computers to phone lines, and computers to radar sets, and computers to seismic arrays and so we had an unusually, uh, knowledgeable group, i.e., might connect computers to phones. feel we had a shot at the thing. That made us And that was part of the reason we decided it was worth the money to the company to, uh, to invest in writing our proposal. BBN was pretty small at ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-6 that point and so it was a non-trivial choice to go spend money on a big proposal, uh, of that kind. But, uh, we at that time didn't, uh, really think a great deal about what the long term benefits might be. It was simply an interesting opportunity and a fascinating sounding project, and, uh, obviously it would involve BBN in the mainstream of academic computer science. And BBN was a half-world anyway. I mean, it was a ... you know, a ... a ... a bike ride from Harvard and a bus ride from MIT. And so it had a lot of people that were interested in, uh, in ... in academic computer science. It, uh, the company, I guess, was, uh, in the business of thinking it ought to make money, but it was, uh, it was very much of a half-world. So I think the people there were fascinated by the prospect of getting more involved with all the universities in the country and working on this network project. (OFF MIKE) ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-7 QUESTION Um, when you realized you got this project, um, what were your thoughts then? (Overlap) FRANK HEART Well, now you're talking five or six months later when we won? QUESTION Yeah, and ... and also, why do you think you did win? Uh ... FRANK HEART Well, I don't obviously know completely why we won, because it was a competitive procurement, and ARPA was evaluating a number of different proposals. I think that the reason we ... we had a chance at winning was that we had an unusually strong group of people who had had a great deal of experience in connecting computers to phone lines and computers to radars. ,_And so I think ARPA probably felt we had a reasonable shot at actually building the thing and making it ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-8 work. Uh, Ithink also ... there were probably also some other factors. Uh, BBN was, uh, a very much a, uh, a consulting company kind of background. So people there were kind of on their own. There wasn't very much top down executive management. I mean, once we, uh, were doing something, you were mostly left alone to do it. And, um, most of the people at BBN were really very much on their own. If they ... if they managed to get money for something they could survive. And if they didn't, there wasn't much company support for ... for the long term. So I think that maybe ARPA felt that we were small and, you know, and didn't have a lot of bureaucratic overhead and a lot of bureaucratic costs and so forth. And that was certainly true. QUESTION Did you think that, uh, you'd be able to pull this ... and again, try to incorporate the context of ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-9 the question ... did you think you'd be able to pull this thing off once you actually got the job? FRANK HEART e were certain we could pull it off ... once we got the job. We ... we were very confident that we could do it. It was, uh, it was ... you know, people at that point who were at BBN loved intellectual challenges. I mean, there were people that, uh, uh, lived and breathed on intellectual challenges. In fact, that was better than food and drink to many of them.And one of the people there, a very innovative programmer named Will Prouther(?), uh, the guy that invented the world's first adventure game. I mean, he ... he loved intricate little problems. And ... and ... and so I think most of the people thrived on ... on ... on that and viewed it as a ... as a lot of fun. t QUESTION Urn, what were the guys like? I mean, give me ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-10 ... give me some kind of idea what they ... I mean were they ... nerdy? Did they go to Woodstock? Uh, you know, the ... FRANK HEART Well, there was a mixed crew. 'Vhen I first arrived at BBN, uh, the group that I was working with actually was a ... a somewhat nerdy group. -There were a number of MIT drop outs and, you know, people ... people walked the halls in some cases with shoes and socks. There were dogs in the building. Uh, there were bicycles in the building. People played musical instruments, uh, during the day sometimes. And, uh, so there was some of that. But the people that had come from Lincoln had been more ... a more professional group. And so some of those people were ... were much more seasoned professionals. And so it was a mixtureL_lThere were, uh, there were people of ... of all flavors. And there were some people like Bob Cahn(?), ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-1 I who were very serious scientists. And ... and not at all nerdy as you, uh, as one might imagine. QUESTION Um, tell me more about this dogs, bikes, musicians stuffß It probably tells a lot about the atmosphere of the place you had to work in. FRANK HEART . /' / Well, BBN was simply a veryire!axed place. I think that, as I say, it had a consulting background and, uh, people kind of ..'!s long as they got their work done, and as long as they, uh, were producing, uh, people didn't pay a lot of attention to what they wore, or what else they did as long as it didn't annoy too many ß 'la other people too much Uh, so it was a r ed atmosphere. Ithinkthat was the way, though, that we got much, much more than forty hours a week out of everybodyß I think that we ended up getting sometimes twice that much out of ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-12 people, uh, at no additional cost to either us or the government.Uh, so it was ... it was a very relaxed ... it ws-j verky academic, relaxed //. ß ,,,.?na good universityan it wasa ,,,mmercial compan/yJvetffoughN did try to // make a profit/. "t been so incredib-' ,,// s u ccs f u/tat over t he ye a rs . // / / QUESTION I / What specifically was your job on the ... FRANK HEART ? ß was running the project as ... I was kind of the ... the ... the principle investigator of the contract, and in charge of getting the proposal written and then in charge of the project.And Uh, aft r a whe ile the, bu ,h,n ,ha,, QUESTION ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-13 How ... how ... how was that all for you? How were you ... your most wonderful life experience? Was it the worst thing that ever happened to you? Or... FRANK HEART Well, actually, I think that, urn, in retrospect, uh, it certainly was a ... a real high point of ... of a number of people's professional career. Not very many people get a shot at riding a technological rocket. I think that, urn, uh, there have obviously been in this century other people who have had that ... that joy. I mean, the atomic business, uh, the TV business, uh, you know, molecular biology. But I think that the ARPANET, uh, represents a technological rocket. And it was a lot of fun riding a technological rocket. So, yes. I ... we thought that was a ... a very exciting experience. And certainly looking back at it, it feels like a very exciting experience. You don't get too many oppor... not too many ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-14 people who are technically trained get to be in charge, or ride a big technological rocket. So it was an unusually, uh, interesting experience. QUESTION Um, do you remember the, uh, the story of the first IMP(?) out at UCLA? Were you there? FRANK HEART No, , wassn't?LsJca] er. ' vieved the IMPs at that point as, uh, as children tobe very, very carefully tended. And, uh, You ' /// know, we ... we air shipped that nd we ... -. / we went ... had ... people went down to the {'.i / airport and held its hand until it was physically taken from the truck on to the dolly and from the dolly on to the airplane. And they ... we were  there at the other end to watch it being unloaded k, from the airplane. Because we viewed it as very , critical that it arrive in one piece. And, uh, you - ',,,now, people who carry boxes around the / ' c,ry aren't necessarily notable for being so ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-15 incredibly careful. We wanted to be very sure that they ... saw people watching, and were therefore, extra careful. So that was a very important thing for us ... to get it to UCLA on time. And, uh, it probably got there somewhat ahead of their expectati I think that, uh, tle /:sit--had-t'heir own problems. They were under tsr;frwe: inn -s u r e t c'es on t i i i1ohsl riVr rpeu ers,u h, and they would have Io ed, to have had some delay on our. p.. We..course, were under the gun/eliver ø_n t'm I:)ece. that's what the/tract said. So ... it was ...',,was for u..race. And, uh, I think we probably surprised people in that the machines. go there. And ... I guess the other thing was,?.tt was a little unusual because we'd had the iMP running in Cambridge with its program cycling. And then we turned it off and it shut off softly. And when it arrived at UCLA, all we did was put the power ----------------------------------------------------------- , BBN 20-16 plug on and press the "restart" button, and the program picked up where it took off. That was a big surprise. I think people there had expected that there would be days of getting it back on line and, you know, loading the program and so forth and so to have' it simply run the minute it got rolled into the power plug was, I think, a But, no, I wasn't physically present at surprise. UCLA. QUESTION The, uh, tell us a little bit about, um, the ruggedization(?) of the IMP and, uh, why that was important. What you did and why it was important. FRANK HEART  Well, we were very concerned about reliability. think that, uh, my background at Lincoln had been working on the Whirlwind Computer and Osage(?) system. And there was a guy there who was in charge of those projects named Jay ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-17 Forrester, who was, uh, very, very concerned about reliability. And so I carried that concern with me. And ... as did some of the other people that came from Lincoln. And, um, we were ... we were therefore, anxious to do anything we possibly could to make the machine stay working. And, uh, that's not such an easy problem, because if you think about it, these were supposed to be unattended. They were supposed to run for a long period without anybody touching them. They were supposed to run in far away places where we couldn't get at them very easily. So we actually, uh, used ruggedized, uh, hardware was not really mill spec, but it was very close to mill spec. And we paid a penalty of perhaps ten percent in the hardware to do that. And then we put a lot of energy into, uh, various things to allow us to remotely figure out how the little devil was feeling. I mean, we ... we were able to remotely ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-18 de-bug the program from Cambridge even though the machine was sitting in UCLA. And we were able to make it cross-patch ... that is connect back its interfaces to itself so it could run experiments. And we could do that remotely. And we could load a new program remotely from Cambridge. So when we found that we had to change something, we could do thati_.  And the machine had a thing called the watch-dog timer which meant the program, when it was operating correctly, every little while would poke a piece of hardware and if the little piece of hardware didn't get poked periodically, it would restart the whole machine. And that was a way of avoiding the program getting into loops and just hanging up and not doing anything. So a great deal of effort was put into that and ... and it turns out you can't put too much in. It's really hard to put too much effort into reliability and fault isolation, uh, with distributed things and distributed networks. ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-19 And so over the project's history, uh, we continued to put a great deal of energy into ways of trying to make the, uh, the system more reliable and more trouble free. When you think about a network, urn, someone's sitting at a terminal somewhere punching on their key. And their little tremeral's(?) connected to a phone line which is connected to a computer. That computer is connected now to an IMP and that IMP is connected to other IMPs and eventually to ... after a whole bunch of IMPs, it's connected to some other host, and its program in that host ... and when the guy punches the key, he wants it to work. He doesn't care where in that whole system it's broken. And so, uh, you need to have a way when it's not working ... he calls up and screams at you that the network is broken ... it could be fifty different things that have gone wrong in that long chain. And so you have to have techniques ... we felt we had to have ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-20 techniques for being able to isolate what was wrong. I mean, should one send a Honeywell repairline ... man? Should one call the phone company? Should one call the guy at the host ß computer and tell him his host computer is broken? Uh, is it a modem? I mean, it's a very hard problem to isolate troubles. And so we put all kinds of things in to ... to do that. QUESTION Urn, tell us the story of, uh, how you would, uh, you could see that the phone lines were in trouble, and you'd call the phone company to tell them that your ... they what? FRANK HEART Well, we ... we were ... we had some interesting experiences in trying to make the system reliable because ... for example, if there was a phone line from UCLA to Utah, uh, we had an IMP sitting on both ends of that phone line that was able to tell whether the phone line was working because ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-21 we would send test messages periodically, and if they started not to work, we could tell in Cambridge that the phone line was broken. Well, in the early days of the ARPA network, when we would call some phone company trouble office in California, and say, "Oh, by the way, your line from Utah to ... to UCLA is broken." They say, "Well, where are you?" We said, "Oh, we're in Cambridge, Mass." And they thought we were nuts. And they... they didn't ... they didn't believe this at all. It took quite a while for them to get used to the fact that we could trouble shoot their phone lines from far away. And, uh, that was humorous at first, because every time we'd put in a new piece of the network around the country there would be a new phone company, uh, you know, trouble office somewhere that would have to be educated to the fact that we had far better debugging tools for their lines than they did. And we could tell ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-22 much more precisely what was happening to their phone lines than the phone company could. They had to send people in with probes and voltmeters and things. And we could ... we were sitting there with a very fancy computer at the end of that phone line and could do, you know, could ... could isolate that trouble much earlier. QUESTION Imagine what that would be like today with all the phone companies and the regional Bells and everything else that goes (Overlap) FRANK HEART Well, in fact it is like that today. And in fact, uh, it'sa big problem. Ithink, uh, as you know the Internet's not really run by anybody and so, uh, when things do go wrong, there are problems like that and the more iso... trouble isolation that's built into the various networks, the better. QUESTION ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-23 Um, kind of switching gears for ... for a second. Thinking ... it's twenty-five years later ... you see what's happened with Internet. Thinking back to that time did you have ... when you started on this thing was it just another project? Did you have any idea of the impact? The implications? FRANK HEART 'Well, I think certainly at the very beginning, uh, I at least, did not have an image of how really big it was going to get. Ithink we believed it was important. We believed it was important to a degree because we felt that there were in fact a great deal ... you know, it was ... anything you do which makes communication different between people makes a change in the world. So I think we felt that it was important. But I think we had an image only of it sort of affecting computer science departments and ... and .. and the technical community. I don't think we at ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-24 that time had the idea it was going to change the world. I think that, uh, by five years later, I think it ... and especially with the amazing and surprising growth of E-mail, Ithink we then realized that it was going to change the world. I mean, a report was written, uh, with ARPA Funds called a completion report, in probably '76 or '77. And at that time there wasasentence in there, uh, of the general form that, uh, that the, uh, that the use of E-mail had become so interesting that we felt it was going to sweep the world. And of course, it has. And you can now, uh, send messages to President Clinton by E- mail. And so, uh, that probably ... that... that is probably defined as sweeping the world at this point. Uh, but I don't think we knew at the very beginning how big it would be. No. QUESTION Um, how did, uh, jokes ... anecdotes ... I know this something that you don't feel particularly ----------------------------------------------------------- , BBN 20-25 strongly about wanting to ... to, uh, maybe contribute, but is there anything ... is there any funny little story, jokes, anecdotes, best experiences, worst experiences ... anything that comes to mind? FRANK HEART (Sighs) (Laughs) QUESTION Guess not. QUESTION (Inaudible) let me coach you a little bit. FRANK HEART Alright. QUESTION Do you remember when, uh, Sahira(?) wanted to (Inaudible) resistance pin and you were very worried ... you were worried that Sahira was going to go down to Washington (Inaudible) wearing this resistance button? FRANK HEART ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-26 Well ... in terms of how the people on the project interacted with the government and with the rest of the academic community, there were obviously a ... a whole set of different kinds of reactions. I mean, we had some people that ... 'that, you know, would refuse to ever put on anything but sneakers. Uh, Crowler(?) would never wear anything but sneakers. And there were other people like Ornstein(?) who ... who were in ... very interested in ... in saving the world. And ... and ... and being involved in various, uh, peace movements. And so since we were working for the Defense Department, uh, and since we were often interacting with fairly uptight people around the country, uh, our group sometimes did have funny experiences. But I don't know that I can recall anything specific. I think it was a constant concern when we would go to meetings with, uh, with various DOD people and, uh, these relatively, uh, you know, ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-27 young and relatively informal people would involve themselves with it. It was obviously a certain amount of clash of. personalities. But I don't know if there were specific things that, uh, that occur to me that were funny. QUESTION How did you as the team leader of this deal with all of this? FRANK HEART I tried to protect the people I had from the outside world, and the outside world from those people ... is what I did. Yes. I was a suit and ... despite my informal attire today, I was a suit and tie type in ... in the business and I was sort of in charge of being the buffer, uh, between, uh, the outside world and that group. QUESTION Urn, and yet another change of gears here, and we may come back and retrace some of these things, but we doing fine timewise? ----------------------------------------------------------- , BBN 20-28 (OFF MIKE) QUESTION Um, blue sky(?) ... and I know this is hard for engineering minds ... twenty-five years from now ... where is Internet or communications going to be? FRANK HEART Well, I think there are several things that are obvious, and then some others that are a little less obvious as to what the future might hold. I think that, uh, it's ... it's become, I.guess, very, very clear that as soon as, uh, suitable billing systems are ... are constructed and installed ... and that's happening right now, so that's only a matter of, uh, you know, one to two years before that'll be available. In other words, right now you can use the phone system when you have an 800 or a 900 number or something to make charges on your phone. In just a little while people will put in place billing systems so ----------------------------------------------------------- , BBN 20-29 the Internet can be used to buy things. That's happening in small ways already and it's going to happen more ... more globally soon. So certainly there will be a tremendous increase in commerce. Uh, the ability to buy things from all over the world. Uh, and ... and charge them, uh, through your ... through your Internet. That's one trend that Ithink is very, very close in. I think another thing that's clearly going to happen is people are going to be talking to their machines ... uh, essentially all over the world and all their machines. I mean, you can ... you'll want to be talking to your ... to your VCR, you'll want to be talking to your Internet. Uh, you'll want to be talking to your tele... to ... to your refrigerator. And ... and so Ithink the use of speech input is ... is now very, very close. And, uh, and I think that will affect the way people use the Internet as well as they use everything else in their lives. So that's a second trend that I ----------------------------------------------------------- BBN 20-30 think is... is fairly clear. Ithinkathird trend is that, uh, people are soon gonna have all kinds of personal carriable machinery. In other words, it's not going to be very long before everybody will kind of be ca... well, I say not very long ... you said twenty-five years. Within that period there will be a great deal of ... of ... of things that people will carry in the way of computer equipment. Like they'll carry, uh, a pulse monitors, and they'll carry things that ... that can help, you know, get help in the event of a heart attack and ... and police officers will carry things that will tell where they are when they get shot on a back street in New York. And ... and so there will be a tremendous increase in person carriable computer stuff. And that stuff will all be hooked into the Internet. So those are three things that I would claim are ... are ... the first is happening now. The second'11 happen, you know, in ... in a ... in a small number of years. ----------------------------------------------------------- , BBN 20-31 And the third in a somewhat longer time. Though, there are probably other changes that we don't know abut that ... that will take place. QUESTION Today ... the first ... now looking back to the first twenty-five years what's ... what's the single greatest accomplishment ... (OFF MIKE) (CUT) (END OF TAPE //20) -----------------------------------------------------------