【OHI】Larry Roberts interview selection
I’ve never been lonely. And I lived and worked at my house and in the evenings, as well as during the day at the Pentagon; I got everything built. I was also managing all of the R&D for computer science. So my program started out at 15 million dollars a year that I was responsible for all the computers science and research. And over time, by careful managing of how the budget process worked in our apartment, I grew it up to 50 million in the years. I stayed about 6 years because that's all I figured I should stay anywhere.
I’ve never been lonely. And I lived and worked at my house and in the evenings, as well as during the day at the Pentagon; I got everything built. I was also managing all of the R&D for computer science. So my program started out at 15 million dollars a year that I was responsible for all the computers science and research. And over time, by careful managing of how the budget process worked in our apartment, I grew it up to 50 million in the years. I stayed about 6 years because that's all I figured I should stay anywhere.
Larry Roberts
“I’ve never been lonely”
BZ: Today, when we look back and like, you know, in the earlier 1970s or late 1960s there, we were appalled how much you really achieved, but actually behind those kind of achievements, lot of work, lot of, like, and, you know, hours and you may have seven hundred hours, and working on the machines (LR: I worked at home). Are you a lonely, um, scientist working there?
LR: I’m not, I’ve never been lonely (BZ: Okay, so you're…). And I lived and, and I worked at, at my house, um, and in the evenings as well as during the day at the Pentagon; I got everything uh built. I was also managing all of the R&D for computer science (BZ: Okay) so my program started out at 15 million dollars a year that I was responsible for all the computers science and research. And, over time, by careful managing of how the budget process worked in our apartment, I grew it up to 50 million, um, in the years. I stayed about 6 years because that's all I figured I should stay anywhere.
“I formed Telenet.”
BZ: I really wanna, you know, got your opinion about TCP/IP, you know, today, later on
LR: But, but the other thing I, I then did was after, after ARPA, I went and built Telenet which was the first public payload carrier for a packet switching. I mean, this is all packet switching. The internet, as a thing, is those computers that are interconnected as a common media, but there's private networks and there's and then we built, uh, in, when I, when I finished with ARPA in 1973, I formed Telenet.
Telenet became a carrier, common carrier, actually. And, and offer services throughout the world, through other carriers where we provided equipment to them, actually, because we built the equipment to do the packet-switching. And this was X.25. X.25 was a protocol I designed from scratch which, uh, because I knew we couldn't have a network without a standardized protocol that you could say used XYZ to connect to our network and XYZ was designed and built for your computer, it was available, hopefully.
So, um, I designed X-25 and went to the ITU which was then CCITT and, and, uh, worked with England, and France, and, well, England and Germ… and Japan and Canada and ourselves in France with the only ones interested, and we, we, we got the thing passed; there is a standard, very quickly, in, by 1975. And, and then, uh, that was what we started using them as the international standard for packet switching for the next 20 years.
“It showed me how involved people can get on one way of thinking”
BZ: Here's like, is, my, my question: Why is industry don't want to change so quickly while the technology is ready, and the demand is, you know, there, and, and also in some way, you know, you have to change eventually. Why the industry works, sort of work, behind the scientist?
LR: Well, first of all, AT&T, when I was ready to leave ARPA in '60, you know, in 1973, I said: Okay, I’ve, I’ve got the network running; I’ve done everything I need to do here; I’ve spent my 6 years, so, I’m gonna, I’m going to, uh, go start Telenet; that’s a new career.
But before I decided to do that, I knew that from ARPA`s point of view, they shouldn`t keep running the network. It was not a research project anymore. It was an operating activity; it was, it was, uh, the operating network.
So what I did was I went to AT&T, and I said: I will give you all the equipment and you own all the lines anyway; we'll start paying and lease them, and you can charge for the network to everybody, including us, and build from there, and BBN [Bolt, Beranek, and Newman] is building the equipment. You can expand it as much as you want.
They had a big committee study, this for months and finally decided: No. It was not in their interest to be involved in packet-switching; it took them about five more years to change their mind, and even when they tried to do it over and over, they couldn't do it, because their senior engineers just weren't thinking that way; they were thinking circuit-switching.
They couldn't believe, you, the packets wouldn't fall on the floor, they just couldn't get changed their concepts of how the system would work. So, it took them just a long time to change their minds because that was the industry and that industry had been in for years. And it showed me how involved people can get on one way of thinking.
