In the Beginning
A lot of things happened in 1969 that changed everything. There was the moon landing, Woodstock, the syndication of “Doonesbury.”
Also, though it took longer to register its effects in the population at large, that year also saw the transmission of the first Internet message. Or, as Len Kleinrock describes it, the world’s first instance of host-to-host, packet-switched data communications between networked computers.
In a city that lives for media and communications, Kleinrock, professor of computer science at UCLA, winner of most of the world’s most important engineering awards and honors, is one of Los Angeles’ least known electronic celebrities.
Yet it is to Kleinrock’s UCLA lab that we can trace the prototype of the system that has since come to be known as the Internet, and thus a major portion of what has since evolved into the current culture of cyber-everything.
At the heart of this historic development was Kleinrock’s seminal work conceiving the principles of packet switching--the technique of breaking large electronic messages into smaller pieces that can be sent efficiently through telephone lines.
Packet switching made it possible for the first time to conduct several of these electronic data conversations on the same line at the same time. Individual “packets” from several different data streams were interspersed with one another to make maximum use of the communications capacity, then reassembled at the receiving end.
This technology is still the basis of networking and computer-to-computer data communications.
How does the whole online culture strike Kleinrock now, not quite 30 years after the Internet was switched on?
“I’m certainly surprised at how quickly it’s caught hold,” says Kleinrock, 62. “We didn’t predict how the technology would penetrate so many aspects of our lives.”
Kleinrock adds, however, that he is not at all surprised at the great extent to which the chat rooms and e-mail of the online world have become virtual social spaces for a wired generation--the aspect of computer networking that seems to command the most popular interest and criticism. Kleinrock had already seen the phenomenon of e-mail addiction take place.
“In 1972, we introduced e-mail to the Internet as an afterthought, and it just took over among the users,” he recalls. “It’s the people-to-people contact that’s most compelling.”
Now that the distances between computers have been bridged by the Internet and other networking technologies, Kleinrock is working to connect the physical and functional distances between computers and people, an effort that has become the newest phase of his career.
He is researching what he calls “nomadic computing,” bridging the gulfs between computers, communications resources and the people who use those tools wherever and however they travel.
“Computing and communications have finally converged,” says Kleinrock. “It took 25 years, but it finally happened in the Internet. Now you’ll never be able to talk about one without the other.”
Kleinrock thinks better integration of computing and communications tools will enable a paradigm shift in society as profound as the onset of the Information Age, one in which today’s separate gadgets such as cell phone, portable PC, pager and personal digital assistant will combine into simpler, smaller, easy-to-use devices.
“I’m interested in two-way computing that’s both portable and capable--with good interfaces, good screens, lots of storage and good keyboards,” he says.
So, for the onetime master of the giant number crunchers that old-time computer professionals like to refer to as “big iron,” the most treasured technology is the tiniest. These days, Kleinrock doesn’t make a move without first Velcroing onto his belt a two-way Motorola e-mail pager, a Psion 3C personal digital assistant and a cell phone.
The IBM ThinkPad 760 notebook computer usually goes along too. Kleinrock is a man who likes to command instant contact with information--or people--and the limitations of time, technology or geography be damned.
He’s even founded a company, Nomadix, to develop products for people who want to take their computing capabilities on the road.
For those detail-oriented, wired-age sorts who may be wondering, that first Internet message was an L, just the single letter, typed by a computer scientist in Kleinrock’s UCLA lab who was trying to log on to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute.
The historic L was to be the first letter of the word “log.” Unfortunately, but perhaps prophetically, the system crashed after the technician typed the O. Some hours later, they managed to transmit the entire three-letter word and successfully logged on to the SRI computer, launching the Internet.
Freelance writer Paul Karon can be reached via e-mail at pkaron@pacbell.net
