Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

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Below is a partial transcript from the 1994 filmed interview conducted by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

Historian Interviewers: John McLaughlin and Ward Winslow.

Q. When was the first Internet transmission?

It was the fall of 1969, just 25 years ago last September, October sometime. The thing about it is neither the man in charge of the UCLA site nor I in charge of the SRI site remembers the actual date because it was just building all the layers of communication they have to do. But that's when the first packet was exchanged apparently.

The reason my computer was the second one to get connected into the Internet was because I'd volunteered to start and run an on-line network information center and it was so closely related to the things I wanted to do anyway, so it was a natural.

So I volunteered in 1967, when all of us ARPA researchers were first told we would be the guinea pigs and the participants in this new computer networking — which thrilled me because, gee, that's the way you could really get a distributed community of knowledge workers.

So anyway, today when I see how big the Internet is, it's just really interesting to realize that it started with just us two.

Q. Did you have a different view of the computer?

A. Yeah. Because I went into the computer field because I had this great crusade of saying, "Hey, what I'm interested in is helping people collectively cope better with complexity and urgency," and numbers are just a very small part of that. The reasons why you want to do something. The explanations, the descriptions, they're all of the kind of things that you have to go through in order to absorb some knowledge or exchange some knowledge.

So to me, that represented an extremely important thing just because that fit my goal. And then by 1962, I'd realized too that the first people or communities or whatever that really start focusing on that and make improvements in their collective knowledge work that the first ones then could apply that to improving that capability in others.

Including the collective IQ and the importance it would have and it's there to go after while the National Information Infrastructure is just sort of one level that makes a huge difference to it. But there's all the rest of it, explicit. So why can't we get dialogue out there about that and explicitly to say, "If they thought about, well, we can go to the moon or we can do something like that — this is much more simple and all that. That's the frustration.

Q. Tell us about the time you've spent on the Internet.

A. Well, in a way I've been on it since 1970. So I'm trying to harness a kind of a use for it. We're talking about my use of the Internet and since we first got on it in 1970, and we developed electronic mail then and by the time other people were doing it, we had lots of communication. So it's been an important part of our world. You know, transferring files, working with people. But the new mosaic kind of thing, we've had to invest a lot in trying to preserve all of the capability. The system we built through years and learned a lot about . . .preserve it so we can show it and use it to people.

Well, the awkward part about it is that it only runs on a computer whose design is like 20 years old and it takes you know 10 feet by 7 feet of cabinet space to run in an air-conditioned room and costs more in a month to maintain than it would cost us to buy that much horsepower. We could buy 10 times that much horsepower for the monthly cost of maintaining it.

But it's got these, there's more than 150 man years of software development in there that's all tuned to what you can really do so that's where we live and work on that. We're getting some government money to start trying to show more people how that works by building a better interface and such, but for the time, being that's where we're doing most of our work and that's not outfitted to reach across through with that mosaic-like thing, so we'll get there in a few months and then be able to do that.