A Brief History of the Second Korean War
Obviously this is a hypothetical and I most sincerely hope it remains so!
The Second Korean War began the night of Sunday, August 20, 2017, though few people knew it at the time. Power started going down in Pyongyang and the few other North Korean cities with significant electrification. Residents in the countryside reported a strange black fibrous substance falling from the sky and hanging from electrical wires, power substations, and other systems. A few reported seeing parachutists or men gliding down from the sky.
Tensions had been high since the launch of four North Korean missiles toward the US unincorporated territory of Guam earlier that week. One missile had malfunctioned on launch, another suffered a mysterious in-flight malfunction and exploded, but two had arrived time on target near US territorial waters. In response, first North Korea, followed by South Korea and Japan, had announced a full mobilization. The US went to DEFCON 4, and remained in a status of watchful readiness as increasingly frantic international efforts were made to resolve the Korea Crisis, as it came to be called.
On Friday, the 18th of August, the US had quietly gone to DEFCON 3, and all US Air Force, SOCOM, and Marine assets were mobilized. The EU and NATO members, except the UK and former Warsaw Pact members, plus Turkey, declared neutrality. Australia declared solidarity with the US, but New Zealand declared it was withdrawing from the ANZUS Pact. Canada likewise declared neutrality.
China began to mobilize its mobile forces, and Chinese positions along the Yalu river were reinforced by several hundred thousand troops.
As with the Gulf War, the US planned to begin offensive operations against North Korea on the dark of the moon, first inserting Special Operations and UK SAS and SBS troops as forward observers, and then dropping conductive carbon-fiber chaff to disrupt electrical and communications facilities.
The war began in earnest at night at 04:00 South Korean time (+9:00 UTC) August 21, 2017, when the South Korean port of Busan went up in a mushroom cloud. The underwater burst also resulted in a large tsunami which did significant damage along the coast. It is believed that the device was delivered either via a North Korean suicide sub or half-submarine, or else in container freight. The US amphibious assault ship USS America, the already damaged destroyer USS John McCain, the destroyer USS Chafee, the US hospital ship USNS Mercy, and a number of support and logistics vessels were severely damaged and irradiated and had to be evacuated and scuttled. The US 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit suffered 80% casualties.
Surprisingly, Russia declared solidarity with the US and South Korea, allowing its airspace and ports to be used by the US (but not Japan or South Korea). As a result, China declared a full mobilization, followed by Russia, Eastern Europe, and then NATO.
The US 7th Fleet dispersed as it expected to be a prime target for any additional nuclear weapons, and the US went to DEFCON 2.
President Trump went to Congress and gained an almost-unanimous Declaration of War. As soon as he had this in hand, Trump announced the firing and detention of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and imposed a nationwide State of Emergency and dusk-to-dawn curfew under NSPD-51.
All interstate highways were closed to non-military traffic. All civil air traffic in the US was shut down, and civilian airliners were drafted for use as troop and supply transports. As in the Cuban Missile Crisis, young children were wowed by the distinctive quadruple contrails of ancient B-52’s going to and from their fail-safe points, and US citizens particularly in the US midwest and west were rocked by near-constant sonic booms as fighters scrambled to fly combat air patrol missions over American cities.
Several US cities experienced mass protests and rioting, which were put down with military force, resulting in thousands of casualties. Washington, DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon had their municipal governments replaced by military governors.
Following the US Declaration of War, the US went to DEFCON I, and strategic, non-nuclear strikes began against North Korean air defense, command and control, and strategic missile facilities.
In response, North Korea attempted to launch its remaining medium and long-range nuclear missiles. None of these reached ground or naval targets and successfully detonated, but two nuclear devices were detonated at an altitude of 400 km, one over Seoul, and one over southern Japan, resulting in substantial electromagnetic pulses. The fear created by this massive aurora and disruption of the earth’s magnetic field, and the failure of many electrical transformers and computer systems created great unrest and political dislocation resulting in the fall of both the Japanese and South Korean Governments. But with different results, whereas Japan declared neutrality and banned combatant ships and planes from its territory, the new South Korean junta declared all-out war.
The territory along the North Korea/South Korea border, particularly the 30 km from the border to the outskirts of Seoul, became a hellish free-fire zone. It is estimated that 300,000 shells landed on Seoul in the first hour following the South Korean official Declaration of War. The bombardment and subsequent firestorm, as well as the use of nerve gas and biological agents, resulted in huge loss of life. The South Korean highways were jammed with people trying to flee in all directions, even in some cases, toward the front lines, and military maneuver became all but impossible for mechanized and armored units.
Although the advance by North Korean troops toward Seoul was stymied a mere 20 km into South Korea, and also stopped just over the border at the eastern coastal road, infiltration units quickly cut off pockets of ROK and US troops between the cities of Yeoncheon, Cheorwan, Yangu, and Goesong. The ROK troops fought stoutly for a week, but following another underwater nuclear blast in the channel near Inchon, and widespread use of North Korean school children as sappers to clear minefields and as human bombs, the northern pockets became demoralized and surrendered between August 30 and September 2. Small groups of special forces and SAS troops as well as local ad hoc groupings of ROK forces and militia kept up a guerrilla war in the besieged cities and mountains, until they were decimated and forced to retreat by the use of chemical weapons, which also killed the better part of the civilian populations in those cities.
Meanwhile, a UN Security Council resolution supporting South Korea and the US under Article 7 was vetoed by China. However, as in the first Korean War, a General Assembly resolution by the US was overwhelmingly passed. Unlike the First Korean War, this resolution was co-sponsored and supported by Russia.
Consequently, a small trickle of reinforcements from nations which could provide their own transport, such as the UK, Turkey, India, and Australia, began to arrive in theater. The US 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force, The US Third Marine Division, comprised of 3, 4, and 12 Marine Regiment, and 1 Battalion, First Special Forces Group, arrived from Japan. They were joined by the US 75th Ranger Regiment, US 10th Mountain Division, 86 Brigade Combat Team and 36 Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade Combat Team. US 3 and 4 Marine Regiments along with the British 1 and 2 battalion, Royal Gurkha Rifles, reinforced the East Coast road, setting up roadblocks and ambushes along the road and inland strategic passes.
The remaining reinforcements, joined by Turkish 4 Commando Brigade, were airdropped/airlifted into central Korea and attempted to stabilize a front there, using Chuncheon as their command post under the rubric of UN First Army. They were also unofficially reinforced by elements of the Russian 10th Separate Special Purpose Brigade, and French 2nd Foreign Paratroop regiment, operating as “volunteers” with the sanction of their respective governments.
While the ROK units proved to be stalwart in static defense of prepared positions and urban areas, they quickly became demoralized in the confused central highlands and began to flee south, jamming the roads and making reinforcements and logistics very difficult.
In the meanwhile, the US and allied airforces had established air superiority over North Korea by mid-September and began to bomb front line troops and rear areas and roads and other strategic targets almost at will. This resulted in a large migration of North Koreans fleeing north to China, mirroring the bug-out which was now fleeing south in north-central South Korea. This threatened to overwhelm the Chinese on the frontier until the US, probably with tacit Chinese approval, used cruise missiles and drones to take out the bridges over the Yalu.
Surviving elements of the US 2nd Division and ROK forces in the Seoul theater actually managed to move forward and cross the North Korean frontier, supported by an armored thrust from the newly-arrived 2nd Armored Combat Team, 4rth Cavalry Regiment, and support units from the US 1st Infantry Division, as well as 2 Brigade, US 25th Infantry Division and US 40 Division, 81st Infantry Brigade. They were stopped when, ten miles into North Korea, their second-echelon forces were crippled by a concealed North Korean crude atomic bomb, the “mother of all IED’s” as one officer bitterly, and famously, described it to an embedded reporter.
This left the leading elements exposed, and a brutal close-quarters fight ensued, where human waves of North Korean schoolchildren strapped with mines and crude improvised bombs were mowed down by the trapped US and ROK forces. Until their ammunition ran low. At that point it became a literal hand-to-hand and house-to-house fight, with heavy casualties on both sides.
In the central theater, things were not so good for the UN forces. The bugout of ROK troops which began in mid-September, became a rout by early October, which was only stopped by the advent of cold and mud season. Chinese troops from PRC 12 and 13 army groups were now filling in for the exhausted NK troops, once again under the rubric of being “volunteers.”
The entry of substantial numbers of Chinese elite special forces and chemical weapons troops caused the complete collapse and rout of the central front, with many ROK units surrendering en masse. The Gurkhas, US Marines, SAS and Turkish forces began a fighting withdrawal, eerily similar to the 1st Korean War Battle of Chosin Reservoir.
Russia and the US confronted China (rather hypocritically given their own use of “volunteer” forces) and demanded that the Chinese withdraw. China refused and withdrew its membership from the UN, leading to a further Chapter 7 Security Council Resolution which was passed 13-0, with only Uruguay abstaining.
Noting the defiance of China, Russian marines and special forces seized the North Korean ports of Chonjin and Sonbong.
China declared war on Russia and began a massive invasion along a wide front. This went badly for them. In areas, Russian armored and airborne units penetrated deep into China. China in turn, activated its nuclear mines along the primary Russian invasion routes. Russia retaliated by depopulating Harbin and Nanjing with enhanced-radiation “neutron” bombs in the “Second Nanjing Massacre.”
Fearing losing their strategic nuclear force, and feeling they were now in a use them or lose them posture, China launched a massive counterforce nuclear strike against Russia, South Korea, Japan and the US, resulting in the destruction of what was left of Seoul, Busan (again), several ports in Okinawa, Yokosuka, Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan, Ulan-Ude, Vladivostok, and Petropavlosk, Russia, and Port Darwin, Australia. Japan’s declaration of neutrality was to no avail, as the US had perforce simply refused to quit its facilities there and in the turmoil surrounding the fall of the Liberal Party government, Japan was in no position to enforce its demands.
In the US were destroyed: Guam, Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Nome, Alaska, Pearl Harbor, San Diego, San Francisco, and Livermore, California, Hanford, Washington State, Los Alamos, White Sands, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, Groom Lake and the Nevada Test Site, Vandenberg AFB, Edwards AFB, Cape Canaveral, Colorado Springs, Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Aiken, South Carolina, Amarillo and Houston, Texas, Mount Weather, and Wallops and Norfolk, Virginia as well as Thule, Greenland and Portsmouth, Menwith Hill, and Scapa Flow, UK.
The resulting “limited” retaliatory strike from the US and Russia destroyed 50 strategic sites in China, as well as Shanghai and Guangzhou.
All the New England States except Maine, plus Texas, Hawaii, California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, and Washington state, declared independence from the US and formed the Federal Republic of New England, with its capital at Boston, and The Pacific States of America, with its new capital in Bakersfield, California. Utah declared itself to be the Republic of Deseret. Nevada declared itself affiliated to the Pacific States, but disintegrated into Federal, Pacific, Deseret, and ungoverned territories. The Navajo and Great Sioux nations declared independence within their national territories in the Four Corners region, and Dakotas and western Minnesota and north-west Iowa. Mexico declared the Gadsden Purchase and annexation of former Mexican territories in the southwest null and void and began a series of incursions in the border regions. Texas declared independence, and declared war on Mexico. Alaska petitioned to join Canada, and was provisionally accepted as a Canadian self-governing territory.
The rump US government was overthrown by a military junta. The government in North Korea disintegrated and a ceasefire was declared on November 11, 2017, with a ceasefire in place, to be followed by a staged withdrawal to the 38th parallel. The EU, which had largely survived unscathed, emerged as the new world hyperpower, and guarantor of the cease-fire and armistice terms.
Total immediate casualties of the war were as follows:
Australia: 100 thousand
China: 50 million (estimated)
Denmark: 2 thousand
France: 3 thousand
Japan: 3.2 million
Nepal: 3 thousand
North Korea: 15 million
Russia: 1.9 million
South Korea: 9.6 million
Turkey: 5 thousand
UK: 120 thousand
USA: 16.5 million
Other combatant nations: under 1,000 casualties each
Of these casualties, approximately 1/4 were killed, and 3/4 were severely wounded.
An additional 150 million in early mortality is expected over the next 50 years.
disclaimer: I have no knowledge of actual US planning or deployments aside from what is available from public sources, primarily gloabalsecurity dot org. The force deployments are hypothetical, and based on what I would do if I was the US commander in theater and could set my own order of battle. There’s not a lot of armor because its not that great in built up urban areas nor mountains and forest without a good road infrastructure and I didn’t want the logistical tail. I didn’t go into political events in the US, Koreas, and other countries but the general story is things went to shit as soon as nukes started to be used, which was on the second day of the war. I left out HQ, artillery, naval and air units, and support units, as well as any specific ROK units entirely in the interests of moving along the narrative. As I said, I hope to God this all never happens.
Copyright © 2017 Henry Edward Hardy
On Cultural Appropriation
On Cultural Appropriation
I have done some looking about on google books. The earliest book defining the term “cultural appropriation” which I found is Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation by Bruce H. Ziff, Pratima V. Rao, Rutgers University Press, 1997.
They define cultural appropriation as “the taking–from a culture that is not one’s own–of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge.”
They give eight specific examples, one of which is, “Jazz, blues, soul, rap, and other musical forms emanating out of the Black musical experience in America are adopted by white musicians and audiences as part of a mainstream musical tradition.”
In order to understand why cultural appropriation is in some ways a good thing, let’s talk about jazz.
Let’s assume along with the authors that jazz developed through “cultural appropriation.”
Let’s talk about jazz instruments, say for a group with drums, bass, guitar, saxophone and piano.
Where did these instruments come from and how?
The drum kit derives from military drums used by marching bands on occasions where they were seated and not marching. The double bass derives from the 16th century violone, an Italian instrument. The guitar derives from the oud, brought from North Africa to Spain, where frets were added and it became the lute (from Arabic “Al’ud”). The saxophone was invented by Belgian musical instrument designer Adophe Sax in 1846. It too, came via military marching bands. The pianoforte, today generally called a “piano,” was invented by Italian instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco around 1700.
So what about jazz? What were the precursors of jazz, and how did these instruments come together to make a typical ensemble instrumentation?
Public festivals were held in New Orleans at Place Congo featuring African-style drumming and dance until 1843. The origin of folk blues isn’t well understood, but certainly it contains both African elements, such as polyphony, syncopation, and call-and-response, and the “blues scale” as well as European elements, such as church hymns, 4/4 time, and the 12 tone scale and triadic harmonies. The cakewalk derived from African-American versions of popular tunes combined with a dance derived from the Seminole Nation in the 1880’s. Ragtime derived from dancehall music provided by pianists both black such as William Hogan and white, such as William Krell.
How did these musical strains come together with those instruments to create jazz? What is now sometimes called Dixieland, or traditional jazz, started in New Orleans in the early 1900’s. One important event cited was the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, when many military units were demobilized in New Orleans and military band members hocked their instruments. That’s one way military band instruments such as the tuba (replacing double bass) and saxophone (replacing clarinet) came into prominence in Dixieland.
I could go on but I hope you get the point. Jazz would not exist without “cultural appropriation” as defined by Ziff and Rao, and that it is in some ways a good thing when cultures interact and borrow from each other, even when the power dynamics are severely skewed, it helps to normalize the situation by bringing the two cultures together and creating shared cultural norms and values.
Copyright © 2015 Henry Edward Hardy
Thoughts on the TV show Vikings
Copyright © 2015 Henry Edward Hardy
American Dark Ages, year 41
The United States wasn’t defeated by communism. The United States has been defeated by capitalism.
I count the American Dark Ages as starting December 7, 1972 with the last moon landing.
I have been looking at old ads and propaganda films and I am struck by the ringing tone of confidence that Americans effused back then. There was nothing that Americans couldn’t do. And corporations competed to see who could provide a higher standard of living to the working class.
But now, it wasn’t a communist invasion which ruined and depopulated New Orleans. It isn’t a Russian occupation ruling Detroit and keeping the people in penury. Though it might as well be.
At some point, the predatory element of American capitalism overcame the good sense of the ruling class and the United States started consuming itself. We neo-colonialized our own people. The US now is a hollowed-out caricature of what it once was. In reaction to the introduction of basic environmental and labor protection laws US corporations began to move production, and the jobs and income associated with them, overseas.
The productive effort and scientific and technological genius of the US was squandered on ten million million dollars of military spending. Not a typo, ten trillion dollars.
How can the US afford to bail out AIG for 182 billion but not Detroit for 18 billion? And since AIG was a giant re-insurance firm, why did banks insured by AIG still get bailed out too? And if banks got bailed out, how did AIG lose 182 billion overnight?
Instead of the patriarchal way of the Rockefellers and Carnagies and Mellons, who sought to improve the society through industrialization and philanthropy, albeit for uncertain motives, we now have the Kochs and Scaifes who appear to seek actively to destroy the Republic from within. And a Republican Party that would actually contemplate bankrupting the US in order to try to deny people the chance to *pay for* reasonably fair healthcare.
I am quite sorry to see that dystopian writers like Zamiatin, Huxley, Orwell, John Shirley, Phillip K Dick, Norman Spinrad, John Brunner, William Gibson, and Rudy Rucker, have been largely proven right. Though I am deeply impressed by their insights.
American Dark Ages, year 41. What fun.
Copyright © 2013 Henry Edward Hardy
The people who built the Internet
From 1969 to 2013, the Internet has gone from this:
to this:
Visualization of part of 207.205.0.0/16
I’m going to talk about some of the people who I think were important in setting the shape of things to come. My criteria isn’t really who is most worthy but rather, who did really important things, is interesting, and some early figures have a local Boston connection as you will see.
Vannevar Bush
Tufts BS and MS dual-degree 1913
PhD Engineering 1917 jointly from Harvard and MIT
Worked at Tufts till 1919
American Radio and Research Corporation (AMRAD) at Tufts continuing
1922 founded the American Appliance Company in Cambridge, which became Raytheon
1927 differential analyzer, an analog computer that could solve first order differential equations of up to 18 variables
MIT Prof from 1919
VP and Dean of Engineering at MIT from 1932
One of his students was Claude Shannon, who went on to write “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” an important foundational work in information theory
Headed National Research Defense Council 1938 (later Office of Scientific Research and Development). As such he initiated the Manhatten Project which developed the first atomic bombs.
1938 appointed vice-chair to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which he soon ended up chairing. This was the forerunner of NASA.
Declined to fund Norburt Weiner’s digital computer project, but the Army did. This became ENIAC, one of the first all-purpose general programmable digital computers.
Later instrumental in setting up the National Science Foundation.
As We May Think:
“The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice…
The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few…
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing…
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior…
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected…
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness…”
Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
Claude Shannon
Student of Vannevar Bush at MIT
Proved that Boolean algebra can resolve any logical or mathematical syllogism or operation — thus logic and mathematics can be reduced to zeros and ones
Mathematical Theory of Communication — uniting information theory and thermodynamics
Co-invented first wearable computer
Norbert Weiner
Norbert Weiner — Cybernetics, 1947
MIT prof
Probability theory used in information theory
Cybernetics 1947
Human in the loop–feedback
ENIAC — Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer –1946
JCR Licklider
Project SAGE
MIT
Man-Computer Symbiosis
Memos to the Intergalactic Computer Network
“In the foregoing, I must have exercised several network features. I engaged in information retrieval through some kind of system that looked for programs to meet certain requirements I had in mind. Presumably, this was a system based upon descriptors, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, and not in the near future, upon computer appreciation of natural language. However, it would be pleasant to use some of the capabilities of avant-garde linguistics. In using the borrowed programs, I effected some linkages between my programs and the borrowed ones. Hopefully, I did this without much effort–hopefully, the linkages were set up–or the basis for making them was set up–when the programs were brought into the part of the stytem [sic.] that I was using. I did not borrow any data, but that was only because I was working on experimental data of my own. If I had been trying to test some kind of a theory, I would have wanted to borrow data as well as programs.
When the computer operated the programs for me, I suppose that the activity took place in the computer at SDC, which is where we have been assuming I was. However, I would just as soon leave that on the level of inference. With a sophisticated network-control system, I would not decide whether to send the data and have them worked on by programs somewhere else, or bring in programs and have them work on my data. I have no great objection to making that decision, for a while at any rate, but, in principle, it seems better for the computer, or the network, somehow, to do that. At the end of my work, I filed some things away, and tried to do it in such a way that they would be useful to others. That called into play, presumably, some kind of a convention-monitoring system that, in its early stages, must almost surely involve a human criterian as well as maching [sic.] processing.”
Project MAC Director, 1968-71
Project on Mathematics and Computation — now (more or less) CSAIL at MIT
Developed MULTICS — Multiplexed Information and Computing Service 1965-2000
MULTICS was important for:
No distinction between files and process memory — similar to tmpfs
Dynamic linking
Online hardware reconfiguration
Hierarchical file system
User shell
Brian Kernighan (Project MAC, then Bell Labs) and Dennis Ritchie (Harvard, Bell Labs) wrote C
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie from Project Mac went on to write UNIX 1969-1973
Bill Joy and others backported everything in UNIX to make BSD 1973-1994
Andrew Tannebaum wrote MINIX 1987, which Linus Torvalds turned into Linux 1991
BBN
started by two MIT professors and a student
originally specializing in acoustics
did defense work for submarine detection
Licklider became a star at ARPA
his vision for the Intergalactic Computer Network became the basis for the ARPAnet
First IMPs, ancestors of routers
First autonomous system of the ARPA internet, AS1 (now owned by Level 3 Communications)
ARPANET
“The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users were formulated by computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), in April 1963, in memoranda discussing his concept for an “Intergalactic Computer Network”. Those ideas contained almost everything that composes the contemporary Internet. In October 1963, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA (the initial ARPANET acronym). He then convinced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this computer network concept was very important and merited development, although Licklider left ARPA before any contracts were let that worked on this concept.[5]
Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor continued their interest in creating such a computer communications network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to put to use the computers ARPA was providing them, and, in part, to make new software and other computer science results quickly and widely available.[6] In his office, Taylor had three computer terminals, each connected to separate computers, which ARPA was funding: the first, for the System Development Corporation (SDC) Q-32, in Santa Monica; the second, for Project Genie, at the University of California, Berkeley; and the third, for Multics, at MIT. Taylor recalls the circumstance: “For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So, if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C., and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley, or M.I.T., about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. I said, “Oh Man!”, it’s obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go. That idea is the ARPANET”.[7] Somewhat contemporaneously, several other people had (mostly independently) worked out the aspects of “packet switching”, with the first public demonstration presented by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), on 5 August 1968, in the United Kingdom.[8]”
“The initial ARPANET consisted of four IMPs:[15]
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Leonard Kleinrock had established a Network Measurement Center, with an SDS Sigma 7 being the first computer attached to it;
The Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, where Douglas Engelbart had created the ground-breaking NLS system, a very important early hypertext system (with the SDS 940 that ran NLS, named “Genie”, being the first host attached);
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center’s IBM 360/75, running OS/MVT being the machine attached;
The University of Utah’s Computer Science Department, where Ivan Sutherland had moved, running a DEC PDP-10 operating on TENEX.
The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm on 29 October 1969, from Boelter Hall 3420.[16] Kline transmitted from the university’s SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute’s SDS 940 Host computer. The message text was the word login; the l and the o letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was lo. About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full login. The first permanent ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By 5 December 1969, the entire four-node network was established.[17]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
1971 Ray Tomlinson of BBN sent the first internetwork email — invention of the use of the @ sign for email addresses
Larry Roberts
MIT BS, MS, PhD 1963
Lincoln Labs
1966 program manager in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office
funded ARPAnet
Bob Taylor -> Viet Nam 1969, Roberts became director of IPTO
left 1973
Bob Khan
MA, PhD Princeton 1962/64
Bell Labs then asst prof MIT
BBN develop first IMP
1972 IPTO
1972 demostrate ARPANET by connecting 20 computers
Developed NCP and TCP/IP with others such as Vint Cerf
left DARPA 1986
1992 with Cerf helped to found Internet Society
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn being awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom by President Bush
Don Davies
Imperial College
1947 started at NPL
Working with Alan Turing who was designing the Atomatic Computing Engine
Invented term packet-switching
ACE, the Automatic Computing Engine 1950
Mark I, the first packet-switched network, 1970
First modern packet-switched terrestrial network (aside from automatic telegraph)
Len Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock and the first Interface Message Processor
Routing MIT PhD thesis 1962 MIT
UCLA Prof 1963 to today
First ARPANET connection — his student programmer Charley Kline
The first message was l-o crash
First ARPANET connection between UCLA and ISI at Stanford
Jon Postel
PhD in CS UCLA 1974
MITRE
sri-nic.arpa
Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California from 1977
First Arpanet Connection log
RFC’s editor from 1969 to 1998
Wrote or co-wrote more than 200 RFC’s
IANA founder and head for 30 years — allocated all internet numeric addresses
Administered .us domain
DNS arbitration
Took over the internet in 1998, well 2/3 of it
Only person who has an obituary as an RFC (written by Vint Cerf): RFC 2468: I remember IANA
Robustness Principle (“Postel’s Law”): Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others (often reworded as “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”).
Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf helped invent TCP/IP
TCP/IP
Cultural leader
Requiem for the ARPANET
Jon Postel’s obituary RFC 2468 I remember IANA
Larry Landweber
CSNET
First inter-network TCP/IP connection
NSFNET
Dave Clark
MIT PhD 1973
Project MAC
IAB
We reject Kings Presidents and Voting
Vice Chair of FCC Open Internet Advisory Committee
“In 1968, he received his Master’s and Engineer’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on the I/O architecture of Multics under Jerry Saltzer. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1973. From 1981 to 1989, he acted as chief protocol architect in the development of the Internet, and chaired the Internet Activities Board, which later became the Internet Architecture Board. He has also served as chairman of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.”
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”
[The origin of the above is notes from my lecture at Tufts University for the Tufts System Administrator’s Affinity Group, 2013-03-28]
Copyright © 2013 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 Henry Edward Hardy.
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