The Vision of Computer Networking Communication and its Influence on East-West Relations and the GDR Ronda Hauben rh120@columbia.edu In October 2001 I met Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski at a conference in Berlin(1) Klaus learned of my interest and research in the origins and development of the Internet. He told me that he had been involved in networking research in the mid 1970s and he brought me a map to show me that there had been networking research in Eastern Europe in collaboration with the West. graphic on ITR (This is the map Klaus showed me, which includes networking connections in Poland, the USSR, Austria and the US) Notice the GDR is not included here He explained that he had been at a workshop at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in 1975 and had met Peter Kirstein, an Internet researcher from Great Britain. Klaus remembered a conversation with Peter at one of the evening gatherings discussing whether there was some kind of data that the British government and the East German government would agree to allow to be exchanged on a pilot basis. graphic of Klaus and Peter Also Klaus brought a copy of the proceedings of the September 1975 IIASA workshop on Data Communication to show me. graphic of workshop proceedings I made copies of several of the papers to read when I returned home. Once back in the US, I ordered a copy of the 1975 workshop proceedings. In my paper for the symposium, I describe several of the interesting papers I found in this proceedings. But since we have limited time here today, I will focus on only two of the papers. Then I will provide an introduction to some of the questions the papers raise with regard to the role of IIASA and Eastern Europe in helping to develop and spread the vision and to prepare the groundwork for the spread of the Internet. First I want to say a few words of introduction about the creation of IIASA in 1972 during the Cold War. IIASA has interesting origins. It grew out of an understanding between the US President Johnson and the Soviet Premier Kosegin sometime around 1966. They agreed it would be desirable to have a research institute where scientists from the East and the West could collaborate on global problems, except those relating to military or space. The charter for the Institute, however, wasn't signed until 6 years later in 1972. graphic of signing of Charter This shows the signing ceremony IIASA was created by an agreement between the USSR and the U.S., Britain, Japan, Canada, and 7 European countries. In the East, these countries were Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and the German Democratic Republic. Western European countries signing the original charter were France, Italy, the UK and the Federal Republic of Germany. graphic The institute was established at a former castle in Laxenburg, Austria. It was to be a place where collaborative research could be carried out, in the applied sciences, especially the study of large scale systems by modeling and systems analysis. The founding goal was: "...to initiate and support collaborative and individual research, devise means of enhancing appreciation of this type of research among scientists from all nations...." graphic of charter excerpt One of the papers in the 1975 IIASA workshop proceedings that Klaus brought to my attention, was a paper by Peter Kirstein. The title of the paper is: "The Uses of the ARPA Network via the University College London Node", Kirstein describes research he was doing at the University College London (UCL) in Great Britain. He refers to the theme of the IIASA workshop, the "Interconnection of Computer Networks". graphic He proposes that the crucial research for the development of computer networking is to investigate "the nature of how they would be used, by whom, and for what purpose." graphic As part of his talk, Kirstein presents a diagram of the research to create an internetwork protocol. graphic of UCL Node and NORSAR and ARPANET The graphic shows actual connections that had been set up between the Norwegian research site NORSAR, the US research network ARPANET and the London network at UCL. What is important about this diagram is that it shows the early research involving researchers in three different countries to create the TCP/IP protocol. Kirtstein's paper describes the collaboration between the University College London (UCL) researchers in Great Britain, with ARPA researchers in the US and Norwegian researchers working at NORSAR in Norway. He describes research investigating the collaboration computer networking could make possible. Kirstein writes: A significant body of cooperative work has been possible in the first eighteen months of operation of the UCL node of the ARPANET. This usage has been in widely different fields, most of which was not foreseen at the start of the project. The principle uses have been for information retrieval, communication between research groups, and shared development and use of common programming packages. (p. 60) Kirstein observed that experimental research leads to unforeseen new developments. This demonstrates why actual experience developing new technology is crucial, rather than worrying about standard setting before there is a working implementation to be considered for a standard. There are a number of myths about how the Internet was created. One of the most common is that the Internet was created as the US packet switching network called the ARPANET. This is a graphic of ARPANET in 1971, 2 years before work on tcp/ip began In my current research and writing, I challenge this view. I propose that the birth and development of the U.S. packet switching network, the ARPANET is a significant networking contribution, but that it is not the same as the birth and development of the Internet. The origin and development of a protocol to link networks, of the tcp/ip protocol, is the basis for understanding the origin and development of the Internet. It is the tcp/ip protocol that makes the interconnection of networks possible, and that supports communication across of the boundaries of dissimilar networks. It isn't any single network, like the U.S. packet switching network, the ARPANET, nor the early French packet switching network called CYCLADES that could become the Internet. Rather it is the ability to interconnect diverse networks that is the essential aspect of the Internet. Here is a graphic showing the concept of the Intenrer, independent networks interconnected by gateways The research that Kirstein showed in his diagram, the research to interconnect the ARPANET in the US with NORSAR in Norway and UCL in Great Britain was some of the early research to create the Internet graphic of UCL node again It is impressive to learn that this early tcp/ip research was presented at a workshop in Laxenburg, Austria as early as 1975 to participants from East and West Europe. At the workshop, there were researchers represening 13 countries including: graphic of countries at 1975 IIASA workshop These countries were Austria, Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US. Other papers presented at this 1975 workshop are equally surprising. graphic One such paper is the paper titled "IIASA Data Communication Network" by A. Butrimenko, J.H. Sexton and V. Dashko. Butrimenko and Dashko were from the Soviet Union, and Sexton, the UK. The 3 researchers were part of the IIASA Computer Science Project. graphic In their paper they describe the effort to create an international computer network linking researchers and their research institutions from both Eastern and Western Europe. They call this network IIASANET. They offer several possible configurations: graphic of one of the possible configurations The graphic shows one possible configuration to link several research centers with the Digital Equipment Computer PDP 11/20 at IIASA. They planned to link this network with a computer network for the Austrian Universities and to the European Informatics Network (EIN) being developed at the time to connect computer centers in West European countries. The paper describes the progress made by 1975 in their goal. The authors write: "IIASA began a practical networking activity in 1974 by initiating a series of experimental connections. Since then, connections have been made from IIASA to Moscow, Bratislava, Pisa, Edinburgh and Budapest; from Bratislava to Moscow; and from Budapest to Paris. We recognize the ever increasing importance of this activity for IIASA, and for international cooperation in various fields.: There were occasional experimental connections maintained, but these connections were not maintained on a permanent basis. In my paper I present the details of further meetings which Butrimenko describes, documenting the efforts to develop IIASANET. One such meetings was in Budapest in April 1976. Describing it, Butrimenko writes: At the last meeting of the committees, held in Budapest in April 1976, 19 national institutions were represented, 12 of whom committed themselves to active participation in the IIASA Computer Network. Discussion centered on estalbishing a communication subnetwork. Figure 10 shows the hardware allocation for participation in the Network. from IIASA Conference '76, vol 2, p. 210 graphic of Figure 10 Butrimenko provides this graphic to represent the plan developed at the April 1976 meeting. A site on this plan is Berlin. In sharing his IIASA experience with me, Klaus remembered a IIASA meeting he attended in Budapest, probably in April 1975, where there was a computer network demonstration using modems to link a computer in Budapest, Hungary with a computer in Grenoble, France. At dinner during this conference, Klaus recalls that Dashko urged him to advocate that his research institute back in the GDR begin to use modems. This is relatively early in the use of modems. When Klaus returned home he included a recommendation to begin to utilize modems in his report. He remembers that this suggestion was challenged by an official reading the report because of the suspicion that using modems could jeopardize the security of GDR computer systems. Encountering such resistance among officials at their home institutions was a common experience for the researchers in both the East and the West, who were trying to encourage the use of new technology in their scientific institutions. Klaus reports that the official later apologized and that modems were introduced into the academy of science in the GDR. Looking through a few computer conference proceedings from this period in the late 1970s and early 1980s I found several papers describing networking research in the GDR and other Eastern European countries. graphic For example, I found a few papers describing the effort in the GDR to create the computer network called DELTA and the packet switching subnetwork called KOMET. This is a diagram of the DELTA architecture of a single node. In the upper left hand corner it lists KOMET. KOMET was the networking connection. Delta was planned as "the project of the national computer network for the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the University System in the DDR." This graphic also shows that modems, at least by 1978, were included in the places for an academic network in the GDR. In the plan for DELTA, there was a provision for it to be part of a broader network, part of an internetwork. The authors of the paper write, "In implementation, the interface of the datagram service is designed so that it may be used not only by the levels of the computer network DELTA located over it but also by other computer systems, particularly by computer communication networks.(p. 706) (1978). A report on the early implementation of the plan to create DELTA was presented at the 1981 KOMNET conference held in Budapest. Also at this conference there was a paper about the research to create a gateway for IIASANET in Budapest. By 1979, Butrimenko reported that he was having difficulty getting support for IIASANET from IIASA member research institutions. The need to have agreements made between IIASA and government officials in the countries of the researchers to allow for networking access was becoming too burdensome. Also in this article, Butrimenko presents a diagram of the remote connections available through dial-up lines. graphic But the links that could be made are reported to have been functional only for short periods of time, rather than on a regular basis. Access to computers on a regular basis, however, was needed to be able to create a functioning network linking the computer centers of research institutions in different member countries participating in IIASA. This is a graphic from 1979 configuration I have been told that for several years RADIO Austria was the only functioning link between EAst and West. In the diagram here it shows a connection to Telenet/TYMNET which then connected to networks in the U.S. Along with the difficulties of creating the actual network, however, was the growing recognition of the desirability of collaboration via computer networks. An article written by a Russian scientist, Gennaudij M. Dobrov, an American scientist, Robert N. Randolph, and an Austrian scientists, W. D. Rauch and was published in 1978. It explores the importance of international interactive collaboration for science. The article emphasizes that computer networking is needed to achieve this goal. The authors describe the collaborative process that made it possible for them to write the article. They also describe a 3-week experiment using computer networking for researchers from different countries to be able to participate online in a conference on a common research problem. They report that technical difficulties made the experience frustrating for the researchers. Nevertheless, they conclude that the experiment verified that computer networking would play an important role in realizing the potential of ITR in the future. This explains what the map Klaus showed me was about. My research is a beginning investigation into the role of IIASA in helping to promote interest and experience in computer networking among researchers in several countries in Eastern Europe. Not only did IIASA encourage the development of computer networks within each of these countries, but also there was provision for the possibility of linking up with the networks of other countries. While the interest was there, however, reports from some who were on the technical staff of IIASA during this period, describe how there was neither the ability to overcome the political obstacles nor was the level of technology adequate to make it possible to realize the goal of creating IIASANET. By the end of the 1970s, the desirability of having access to such an international computer network was well established in Europe. The 1970s is still an early period in terms of the development of the Internet. It would take almost 10 more years for the technical Internet research to develop adequately to make an Internet possible. Also the political upheavals in the late 1980s and early 1990's helped to weaken the obstacles to interconnecting the networks of different countries. graphic Wiener In his book "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", Norbert Wiener presents the observation that "Information is Information, not matter nor energy. graphic Information is Information, Not Matter Nor Energy In describing the simple communication among ants, Wiener gives an example that helps to explain the significance of what he means in recognizing the importance of information. graphic communication in the ant Wiener explains how the communication mechanism of ants appears simple, but that this apparently simple means of conveying information "depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and the receiver of the stimulus as well." Just as it is important to consider the whole constitution of the ants which makes it possible for them to send and receive information, to understand how ants communicate, so too it is important to understand modern computer neworking development in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s to understand how the Internet could spread so quickly in this area of the world in the 1990s. While I haven't yet learned if there was data exchanged between Great Britain and the GDR subsequent to Klaus's conversation in 1975 with Peter Kirstein, I have found that there is an important chapter of Internet history to be written documenting how the soil was prepared for the Internet in the international networking efforts in Eastern Europe and IIASA in the 1970s and 1980s. graphic of the Internet Today we have an Internet that spans national borders and makes collaborative online communication possible for people in an ever growing area of the world. I hope that my talk today has helped to demonstrate that understanding the role played in this development by IIASA, GDR researchers and other Eastern European researchers is a subject worthy of investigation and discussion. graphic of url and contact information --------- Notes: (1) "Innovations for an e-Society: Challenges for Technology Assessment" It was published in 1978 in International Forum Inf Doc., 1978, vol 3, (2) The title of the article is "International Networks for International Team Research". It was published in 1978 in International Forum Inf Doc., 1978, vol 3, No. 3. The authors describe the collaborative process that made it possible for them to write the article. They describe a process they call "ITR" or International Team Research. They explain that there is the need for an interactive collorative process for scientists from different countries to be able to work together to tackle the difficult global problems of our times. They recognize the important impetus that computer networking will offer to such international collaboration. In their article they describe a 3-week experiment using computer networking for researchers from different countries to be able to participate online in a conference on a common research problem. They report that technical difficulties made the 3 week experimental network difficult. Nevertheless, they conclude that the experiment verified that computer networking would play an important role in realizing the potential of ITR in the future.