The Era of Fragmentation, Part 2: Sowing the Wasteland

Feb 27, 2026 By Lisa Davis

On May 9, 1961, Newton Minow, newly-appointed chairman of the FCC, gave the first speech of his tenure. He spoke before the National Association of Broadcasters, a trade industry group founded in the 1920s to forward the interests of commercial radio, an organization dominated in Minow’s time by the big three of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Minow knew broadcasters were apprehensive about what changes the new administration might bring, after the activist rhetoric of JFK’s “New Frontier” presidential campaign; and indeed, after a few words of praise, he proceeded to indict the medium which his audience had created. “When television is good,” Minow said,

nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

Instead of a cavalcade of “mayhem, violence, sadism, murder,” and endless commercials “screaming, cajoling, and offending” the audience, Minow advocated programming that would “enlarge the horizons of the viewer, provide him with wholesome entertainment, afford helpful stimulation, and remind him of the responsibilities which the citizen has toward his society.”

Minow did follow up on his rhetoric, but not by cracking down on existing  programming. He instead threw his support behind efforts to open new avenues that would allow less commercially-driven voices to reach television audiences. The 1962 All-Channel Receiver Act, for example, which required TV manufacturers to include ultra-high frequency (UHF) receivers in their sets, opened dozens of additional channels for television broadcasting.

But another medium for distributing television, with a potential capacity well beyond that of even UHF, was already unspooling, mile-by-mile, across the American landscape.

Community Television

Cable television began as community antenna television (CATV), a means of bringing broadcast television to those not reached by the major network stations, often towns nestled in mountainous terrain. In the late 1940s, entrepreneurs began setting up their own antennas on high ground to capture broadcast signals, then amplified them and re-transmitted them through a shielded cable to paying customers below.

Cable operators soon found others ways to bring more television programming to audiences, such as importing stations from a city with broad programming options to one with few channels (from Los Angeles from San Diego, for example). Cable providers began to build out their own microwave networks to allow this kind of entertainment arbitrage, transcending their former confinement to single local markets.  By 1971, about 19 million American viewers were served by cable television (out of a total population of a bit more than 200 million).1

But cable had the potential to do far more with its tethered customers than simply extend the reach of the “wasteland” emanating from the over-the-air broadcasters. Since the signals inside the cable were isolated from the outside world, it was not bound by FCC spectrum allocations – it had, for all practical purposes at the time, potentially unlimited bandwidth. In the 1960s, some cable systems had begun to exploit this capacity to offer programming centered around local events, often created by local high school or university students. The CA of community antenna, that brought television to local consumers, expanded into community access, that brought local producers to television.

In the forefront of proclaiming the potential of cable was a superficially-unlikely proponent of high technology, Ralph Lee Smith. Smith was a bohemian writer and folk musician in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, whose website today focuses mainly on his expertise with the Appalachian dulcimer. Yet his first book, The Health Hucksters, published in 1960, revealed him to be a classic progressive, like Minow, in favor of firm government action to support the public interest. In 1970 he published an article entitled “The Wired Nation”, which he expanded into a book two years later.

In his book, Smith laid out a sketch of a future “electronic highway,” based on a report by the Electronics Industry Association (EIA), whose members included the major computer manufacturers. This highway system, a national network of coaxial cable, the EIA and Smith imagined, would wire up every television in all the homes and offices of the nations. At the hubs of this vast network of activity would be computers, and users at their home terminals would be able to send signals upstream to those computers to control what was delivered to their televisions – everything from personal messages, to shopping catalogs, to books from a remote library.

Wired Cities

In the early 1970s, MITRE Corporation headed a research project that attempted to bring this vision to life. MITRE, a non-profit spun out of MIT’s Lincoln Lab to help manage the development of the SAGE air defense system, had built up staffing in the Washington, D.C. area over the course of the previous decade, settling into a campus in McLean, Virginia. They came to the “wired nation” by way of another visionary concept of the 1960s, computer-aided instruction (CAI). CAI seemed feasible due to the emergence of time-sharing systems, which would allow each student to work at their own terminal, with dozens or hundreds of such devices connected to a single central computer center. Many academics in the 1960s believed (or at least hoped) that CAI would transform the educational landscape, making possible customized, per-student curricula, and bringing top-quality instruction to inner city and rural kids. The problem of the inner cities had become especially pressing at a time when riots raged in American cities nearly every summer, whether in Watts, Detroit, or Newark.

Among the many researchers experimenting with CAI was Charles Victor Bunderson, a psychology professor who had built a CAI lab at the University of Texas in Austin. Bunderson was working on a computer-based curriculum for remedial math and English for junior college students under an NSF grant, but the project proved more than he could handle. So he enlisted the help of David Merrill, an education professor at Brigham Young University in Utah. Merrill had done his PhD at the University of Illinois, under Larry Stolurow, creator of SOCRATES, a computer-based teaching machine. Nearby on the Urbana campus he had encountered PLATO, another early CAI project.

Together Bunderson and Merrill pitched both NSF and MITRE on a larger grant that would fund MITRE, Texas, and BYU together. MITRE would lead the project and apply its system-building expertise to the underlying hardware and software of the time-sharing apparatus. Bunderson’s Austin lab would provide the overarching educational strategy (based on learner control – direction of the pace of learning by the student) and the course software. BYU would implement the instructional content. NSF bought the concept, and provided the princely sum of five million dollars to get TICCET – Time-Shared Interactive Computer-Controlled Educational Television – off the ground.

MITRE’s design consisted of two Data General Nova minicomputers, supporting 128 Sony color televisions for the terminal output. The full student carrel also contained headphones and a keyboard, but a touch-tone telephone could also be supported as the input device. Using inexpensive minicomputers for processing and terminal equipment that was already widely available in homes would bring the overall cost of the system down and make it more feasible to deploy in schools. Under MITRE’s influence, CAI was infused with the spirit of the “wired nation.” TICCET became TICCIT, with “educational” becoming “information”. MITRE imagined a system that could deliver not just education, but social services and information of all kind to the under-served urban core. They hired Ralph Lee Smith as a consultant, and made plans for a microwave link to connect TICCIT to the local cable system in the nearby planned community of Reston, Virginia. The demonstration system went live on the Reston Transmission Company’s cable links in July 1971.

MITRE had sweeping plans in place to extend this concept to a Washington Cable System split into nine sectors across the District of Columbia, to be launched in time for the 1976 U.S. bicentennial. But in the event, the Reston system failed to live up to expectations. For all the rhetoric of bringing on-demand education and social services to the masses, the Reston TICCIT system offered nothing more than the ability to call up pre-set screens of information on the television (e.g., a bus schedule, or local sports scores) by dialing into the MITRE Data General computers. It was a glorified time-and-temperature line. By 1973, the Reston system went out of operation, and the Washington D.C. cable system was never to be. One major obstacle to expansion was the cost of the local memory needed to continually refresh the screen image with the data dispatched from the central computer. MITRE transferred the TICCIT technology to Hazeltine Corporation for commercial development in 1976, where it lived on for another decade as instructional software.

Videotex

The first major American experiment in two-way television is hard to characterize as anything but a failure. But in the same time period, the idea that the television was the ideal delivery mechanism for the new computerized services on the information age sunk firmer roots in Europe. This second wave of two-way-television, driven mainly by telecommunications giants, generally abandoned the upstart technology of cable in favor of the well-established telephone line, as the means for communication between television and computer. Though cable had a massive advantage in bandwidth, telephone held the trump card of incumbency – relatively few people had cable access, especially outside the U.S.

It began with Sam Fedida, an Egyptian-born engineer, who joined the British Post Office (BPO) in 1970. At the time, the Post Office was also the telecommunications monopoly, and Fedida was assigned to design a “viewphone” system, comparable to the Picturephone service that AT&T had just launched in Pittsburgh and Chicago. However the picturephone concept faced an enormous technical hurdle – a continuous video stream gulped down huge quantities of bandwidth, which was prohibitively expensive in the days before fiber optic cables. To be able to transmit just 250 lines of vertical resolution (half of a standard television of the time), AT&T had to levy a $150 a month base rate for thirty minutes of service, plus twenty-five cents per additional minute.

Fedida, therefore, came up with an alternative idea that would be both more flexible and less costly – not viewphone, but Viewdata.2 The Post Office could connect users to computers at its switching centers, offering information services by sending screens of data down to home television sets and receiving input back through the customer’s phone line using standard touch-tone signals. Static screens of text and simple images, which might be refreshed every few seconds at most, would use far less bandwidth than video. And the system would make use of existing hardware that most people already had in their homes, rather than the custom screens required for Picturephone.

Fedida and his successor as lead of the project, Alex Reid, convinced the BPO that Viewdata would bring new traffic, and thus more revenue, to the existing, fixed-cost telecommunications infrastructure, especially in off-peak evening hours. Thus began a trajectory away from philanthropic ideas about how interactive television could be made to benefit society, towards commercial calculations about how online services could bring in new revenue.

After several years of development, the BPO opened Viewdata to users in selected cities in 1979, under the brand name of “Prestel”, a portmanteau of press (as in publishing) and telephone. GEC 4000 minicomputers in local telephone offices responded to user’s requests over the telephone line for to fetch any of over 100,000 different ‘pages’ – screens of information stored in a database. The data came from government organizations, newspapers, magazines, and other businesses, and covered subjects from news and weather to accounting and yoga. Each local database received regular updates from a central computer in London.

A simple Prestel screen

The terminals rendered each page in 24 lines of 40 characters each in full color, with simple graphics composed from characters that contained simple geometric shapes. The screens were organized in a tree-like structure for user navigation, but users could also call up a particular page directly by entering its unique numeric code. The user could send information, as well as receiving it, for example to, submit a request for a seat reservation on an airplane. In the mid-1980s, Prestel Mailbox launched to the public, allowing users to directly message one another.

Prestel’s blocky graphics, composed from rectangles partially or completed filled with color.

Contrary to the engineers’ initial intent, at launch Prestel required a custom television set with a built-in modem and other electronic hardware, likely due to resistance from the television manufacturers, who demanded a cut of the action from BPO’s incurstion in their territory. As one might guess, requiring the purchase a new, very expensive television ( £650 or more) to get started on the service was a huge impediment to gaining subscribers, and the strategy was soon abandoned in favor of cheaper set-top boxes. Nonetheless, the cost of using the system kept most potential users away – £5 a quarter for a subscription, plus the cost of the telephone call, plus a per-minute system fee during daytime hours, plus a further per-minute charge for some premium services. The system only had 60,000 subscribers by the mid-1980s, and was most popular in the travel and financial services industries, rather than for recreational use. It survived into the mid-1990s, but never broke the 100,000 subscriber mark.

Despite its struggles, however, Prestel had many competitors and imitators, with others launching similar services based on screens of text and simple graphics delivered to home televisions over telephone lines. The category was known as “videotex” and systems of that type included Canada’s Telidon, West Germany’s Bildschirmtext, and Australia’s Prestel-based Viatel. Like the BPO’s system, almost all were launched by the state-controlled telecommunications authority. Despite lacking such an organization, videotex found its way to the United States, too, where it eventually spawned a major new competitor in the information services market.

Videotex Reimagined

The story of Prodigy begins in Canada. The Communications Research Centre (CRC), a government lab in Ottowa, had been working on encoding simple graphics into a stream of text throughout the 1970s, independently of BPO’s Viewdata work. They developed a system which allowed designers to add arbitrary colored polygons to their screens, using special character codes to specify position, direction, color, and so forth. Other special characters switched the system between text and graphical modes. This allowed for richer and more intuitive graphics than the Prestel system, which built images from small, simple shapes which could not break the grid of characters.

AT&T, impressed with the flexibility of the Canadian system and freed by the FCC to compete in limited ways in the digital services market by the 1980 “Computer II” ruling, decided to try to bring videotex two-way television services to the American market. The joint CRC and AT&T standard was called NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax).

AT&T developed a terminal called Sceptre, with a modem and hardware for decoding NAPLPS, and launched videotex experiments in several different regions of the country in the early 1980s, each with different partners: Viewtron with the Knight-Ridder newspaper conglomerate in Florida, Gateway with Times-Mirror (another newspaper conglomerate) in California, and VentureOne with CBS in New Jersey. IThe Viewtron and Gateway projects both lost money and closed down in 1986. But VentureOne, although CBS and AT&T closed it down in 1983 after less than a a year of operation, laid the groundwork for a longer-lasting achievement.

A Viewtron weather map, showing off the  power of NAPLPS graphics.

Due to a new court ruling which came down as part of the 1984 breakup of Ma Bell, AT&T (now a long-distance-only enterprise divested of its local operating companies) was once again forbidden from the computer services market. CBS therefore relaunched its videotex efforts with two new partners, IBM and Sears, in 1984. They called the company Trintex, invoking the trinity of companies involved in this new videotex project. IBM, still the dominant computer manufacturer in the world by some margin, brought obvious value to the partnership. Sears would bring its retailing know-how online, and CBS its media expertise and content.3 If Viewdata began videotex’s trajectory towards commercialization, Trintex completed it. 

Trintex hired David Waks, a systems engineer who had been working with computers since his undergrad days at Cornell in the late 1950s, to architect their videotex system.  Waks argued that the system shouldn’t really be videotex at all, or rather that Trintex should abandon the coupling between videotex and home television. The NAPLPS protocol was a fine enough way to efficiently deliver high-resolution graphics over low-bandwidth connections – the Sceptre terminal’s modem supported only 1,200 bits per second, which was pretty good for the time. Waks even improved upon it, coming up with a system for partial refreshes, so that changes could be made to one area without re-delivering the whole screen’s content. However, the assumption that a set-top box connected to a television was the lowest-friction way to deliver online services no longer made sense, given that millions of Americans now had machines perfectly capable of decoding and displaying NAPLPS content – home computers. Trintex, Waks argued, should follow the same model as GEnie and CompuServe, using microcomputer software for the client terminal, rather than a dedicated hardware box. It’s likely IBM, maker of the IBM PC, threw their support behind the idea as well.

By the time the system launched in 1987, one of the three partners, CBS, had dropped out due financial difficulties. Trintex did not have a pleasant ring to it anyway, so the company re-branded itself as “Prodigy.” Local calls to a regional computer connected users to a data network based on IBM’s system network architecture (SNA), which routed them to Prodigy’s data center near IBM’s headquarters in White Plains, New York. A clever caching system retained frequently used data in the regional computers so that it did not have to be fetched from New York, an adumbration of today’s content delivery networks (CDNs).4

Distinguished by its ease-of-use, vibrant graphics, and a monthly pricing structure with no hourly usage fees, Prodigy quickly gained ground on its main competitors, CompuServe and GEnie (and soon America Online). The flat-rate business model, however, depended heavily on fees collected from online shopping and advertisers. Prodigy’s leaders seem somehow to overlooked that interpersonal communication, which consumed hours of computer and network time but produced no revenue, was consistently the most popular use for online services. Just as it had conformed to the technological structure of its predecessors, Prodigy was forced to follow their billing model as well, switching to hourly billing in the early 90s.

A weather map on Prodigy

Prodigy represented simultaneously the acme and the demise of videotex technology in the United States, having derived from videotex but abandoned the idea of the television or some dedicated consumer-friendly terminal as the delivery channel. Instead it used the same microcomputer-centric approach of its successful contemporaries. When TICCIT and Viewdata were conceived, a computer was an expensive piece of machinery that individuals could scarcely aspire to own. Nearly everyone working on digital services at that time assumed they would have to be delivered from central, time-shared computers to inexpensive, “dumb” terminals, with the home television as the most obvious display device. But by the mid-1980s, the market penetration of microcomputers in the U.S. was such that a new world was coming into view. It became possible to imagine – indeed hard to deny – that nearly everyone would soon own a computer, and it would serve as their on-ramp to the “information superhighway.”

Even as videotex manqué, Prodigy was the last of its kind in the U.S. By the time it launched, all the other major videotex experiments in the country had shut down. There was another videotex system, however, which I have not yet mentioned, the most widely used of them all – France’s Minitel. Its story, and the distinctive philosophy of its launch and operation, require their own chapter in this story to elucidate. As if transforming the “boob tube” into a useful tool for self-improvement and communication were not an ambitious enough goal, Minitel sought to bend the trajectory of an entire nation, from relative decline upwards to technological supremacy. 

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Further Reading

Brian Dear, The Friendly Orange Glow (2017)

Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare (2005)

MITRE Corporation, MITRE: The First Twenty Years (1979)

Highly Recommended

The Hobby Computer Culture

[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of hobbyists who loved to play with computers and found them inherently fascinating. When BYTE magazine came out with its premier issue in 1975, the cover called computers “the world’s greatest toy.” When Bill Gates wrote about the value of good software in the spring of 1976, he framed his argument in terms of making the computer interesting, not useful: “…software makes the difference between a computer being a fascinating educational tool for years and being an exciting enigma for a few months and then gathering dust in the closet.”[1] Even as late as 1978, an informed observer could still consider interest in personal computers to be exclusive to a self-limiting community of hobbyists. Jim Warren, editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, predicted a maximum market of one million home computers, expecting them to be somewhat more popular than ham radio, which attracted about 300,000.[2] A survey conducted by BYTE magazine in late 1976 shows that these hobbyists were well-educated (72% had at least a bachelor’s degree), well-off (with a median annual income of $20,000, or $123,000 in 2025 dollars), and overwhelmingly (99%) male. Based on the letters and articles appearing in BYTE in that same centennial year of 1976, it is clear that what interested these hobbyists above all was the computers themselves: which one to buy, how to build it, how to program it, how to expand it and to accessorize it.[3] Discussion of practical software applications appeared infrequently. One intrepid soul went so far as to hypothesize a microcomputer-based accounting program, but he doesn’t seem to have actually written it. When  mention of software appeared it came most often in the form of games. The few with more serious scientific and statistical work in mind for their home computer complained of the excessive discussion of “super space electronic hangman life-war pong.” Star Trek games were especially popular:  In July, D.E. Hipps of Miami advertised a Star Trek BASIC game for sale for $10; in August, Glen Brickley of Florissant, Missouri wrote about demoing his “favorite version of Star Trek” for friends and neighbors; and in August, BYTE published, with pride, “the first version of Star Trek to be printed in full in BYTE” (though the author consistently misspelled “phasers” as “phasors”). Most computer hobbyists were electronic hobbyists first, and the electronics hobby grew up side-by-side with modern science fiction, and shared its fascination with the possibilities of future technology. We can guess that this is what drew them to this rare piece of popular culture that took the future and the “what-ifs” it poses seriously, rather than treating it as a mere backdrop for adventure stories.[4] The June 1976 issue of Interface is one of many examples of the hobbyists’ ongoing fascination with Star Trek. Other than a shared interest in computers—and, apparently, Star Trek—three kinds of organizations brought these men together: local clubs, where they could share expertise in software and hardware and build a sense of belonging and community; magazines like BYTE where they could learn about new products and get project ideas; and retail stores, where they could try out the latest models and shoot the shit with fellow enthusiasts. The computer hobbyists were also bound by a force more diffuse than any of these concrete social forms: a shared mythology of the origins of hobby computing that gave broader social and cultural meaning to their community. The Clubs The most famous computer club of all, of course, is the Homebrew Computer Club, headquartered in Silicon Valley, whose story is well documented in several excellent sources, especially Steven Levy’s book, Hackers. Its fame is well-deserved, for its role as the incubator of Apple Computer, if nothing else. But the focus of the historical literature on Homebrew as the computer club has tended to distort the image of American personal computing as a whole. The Homebrew Computer Club had a distinctive political bent, due to the radical left leanings of many of its leading members, including co-founder Fred Moore. In 1959, Moore had gone on hunger strike against the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program at Berkeley, which had been compulsory for all students since the nineteenth century. He later became a draft resister and published a tract against institutionalized learning, Skool Resistance. Yet even the bulk of Homebrew’s membership stubbornly stuck to technical hobbyist concerns, despite Moore’s efforts to turn their attention to social causes such as aiding the disabled or protesting nuclear weapons. To the extent that personal computing had a politics, it was a politics of independence, not social justice.[5] Cover of the second Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, with sketches of members. Only Fred Moore is labeled, but the man with glasses on the far right is likely Lee Felsenstein. Moreover, excitement about personal computing was not at all a phenomenon confined to the Bay Area. By the summer of 1975, Altair shipments had begun in earnest, and clubs formed across the United States and beyond where enthusiasts could share information and ask for help with their new (or prospective) machines. The movement continued to grow as new companies sprang up and shipped more hobby machines. Over the course of 1976, dozens of clubs advertised their existence or attempted to find a membership through classifieds in BYTE, from the Oregon Computer Club headquartered in Portland (with a membership of forty-nine), to a proposed club in Saint Petersburg, Florida, mooted by one Allen Swan. But, as one might expect, the largest and most successful clubs were concentrated in and around major metropolitan areas with a large pool of existing computer professionals, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City.[6] The Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey convened for the first time in June 1975, in under the presidency of Sol Libes. Libes, a professor at Union County College, was another of those computer lovers working on their own home computers for years before the arrival of the Altair, who then suddenly found themselves joined by hundreds of like-minded hobbyists once computing became somewhat more accessible. Libe’s club grew to 1,600 members by the early 1980s, had a newsletter and software library, sponsored the annual Trenton Computer Festival, and is likely the only organization from the hobby computer years other than Apple and Microsoft to still survive today.[7] The Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange attracted several hundred members to its first meeting at Northwestern University in the summer of 1975. Like many of the larger clubs, they organized information exchange around “special interest groups” for each brand of computer (Digital Group, IMSAI, Altair, etc.). The club also gave birth to one of the most significant novel software applications to emerge from the personal computer hobby, the bulletin board system—we will have more to say on that later in this series.[8] The most ambitious—one might say hubristic—of the clubs was the Southern California Computer Society (SCCS) of Los Angeles, founded in Don Tarbell’s apartment in June of 1975. Within the year the club could boast of a glossy club magazine(in contrast to the cheap newsletters of most clubs) called Interface, plans to develop a public computer center, and—in answer to the challenge of Micro-Soft BASIC—ideas about distributing their own royalty-free program library, including “’branch’ repositories that would reproduce and distribute on a local basis.”[9] Not content with a regional purview, the leadership also encouraged the incorporation of far-flung club chapters into their organization; in that spirit, they changed their name in early 1977 to the International Computer Society. Several chapters opened in California, and more across the U.S, from Minnesota to Virginia, but interest in SCCS/ICS chapters could be found as far away as Mexico City, Japan, and New Zealand. Across all of these chapters, the group accumulated about 8,000 members.[10] The whole project, however, ran atop a rickety foundation of amateur volunteer work, and fell apart under its own weight. First came the breakdown in the relationship between the club and the publisher of Interface, Bob Jones. Whether frustrated with the club’s failure to deliver articles to fill the magazine (his version), or greedy to make more money as a for-profit enterprise (the club’s version), Jones broke away to create Interface Age, leaving SCCS scrambling to start up its own replacement magazine. Expensive lawsuits flew in both directions. Then came the mismanagement of the club’s group buy program: intended to save members money by pooling their purchases into a large-scale order with volume discounts, it instead lost thousands of members’ dollars to a scammer: “a vendor,” as one wry commenter put it “who never vended” (the malefactor traded under the moniker of “Colonel Winthrop.”)[11] The December 1976 issues of SCCS Interface and Interface Age. Which is authentic, and which the impostor? More lawsuits ensued. Squeezed by money troubles, the club leadership raised dues to $15 annually, and sent out a plea for early renewal and prepayment of multiple years’ dues. The club magazine missed several issues in 1977, then ceased publication in September. The ICS sputtered on into 1978 (Gordon French of Processor Technology announced his candidacy for the club presidency in March), then disappeared from the historical record.[12] Whatever the specific historic accidents that brought down SCCS, the general project—a grand non-profit network that would provide software, group buying programs and other forms of support to its members—was doomed by larger historical forces. Though many clubs survived into the 1980s or beyond, they waned in significance with the maturing of commercial software and the turn of personal computer sellers away from hobbyists and towards the larger and more lucrative consumer and business markets. Newer computer products no longer required access to secret lore to figure out what to do with them, and most buyers expected to get any support they did need from a retailer or vendor, not to rely on mutual support networks of other buyers. One-to-one commercial relations between buyer and seller became more common than the many-to-many communal webs of the hobby era. The Retailers The first buyers of Altair could not find it in any shop. Every transaction occurred via a check sent to MITS, sight unseen, in the hopes of receiving a computer in exchange. This way of doing businesses suited the hardcore enthusiast just fine, but anyone with uncertainty about the product—whether they wanted a computer at all, which model was best, how much memory or other accessories they needed—was unlikely to bite. It had disadvantages for the manufacturer, too. Every transaction incurred overhead for payment processing and shipping, and demand was uncertain and unpredictable week to week and month to month. Without any certainty about how many buyers would send in checks next month, they had to scale up manufacturing carefully or risk overcommitting and going bust. Retail computer shops would alleviate the problems of both sides of the market. For buyers, they provided the opportunity to see, touch, and try out various computer models, and get advice from knowledgeable salespeople. For sellers, they offered larger, more predictable orders, improving their cash flow and reducing the overhead of managing direct sales. The very first computer shop appeared around the same time when the clubs began spreading, in the summer of 1975. But they did not open in large numbers until 1976, after the hardcore enthusiasts had primed the pump for further sales to those who had seen or heard about the computers being purchased by their friends or co-workers. The earliest documented computer shop, Dick Heiser’s Computer Store, opened in July 1975 in a 1,000-square-foot store front on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Heiser had attended the very first SCCS meeting in Don Tarbell’s apartment, and, seeing the level of excitement about Altair, signed up to become the first licensed Altair dealer. Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop followed later in the year in Mountain View, California. In March of 1976, Stan Veit’s Computer Mart opened on Madison Avenue in New York City and Roy Borrill’s Data Domain in Bloomington, Indiana (home to Indiana University). Within a year, stores had sprouted across the United States like spring weeds: five hundred nation-wide by July 1977.[13] Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop at 1063 El Camino Real in Mountain View. Ed Roberts tries to enforce an exclusive license on Altair dealers, based on the car dealership franchise model. But the industry was too fast-moving and MITS too cash- and capital-strapped to make this workable. Hungry new competitors, from IMSAI to Processor Technology, entered the market constantly with new-and-improved models. Many buyers weren’t satisfied with only Altair offerings, MITS couldn’t supply dealers with enough stock to satisfy those who were, and they undercut even their few loyal dealers by continuing to offer direct sales in order to keep as much cash as possible flowing in. Even Dick Heiser, founder of the original Los Angeles Computer Store, broke ties with MITS in late 1977, unable to sustain an Altair-only partnership.[14] Dick Heiser with a customer at The Computer Store in Los Angeles in 1977. Not only is the teen here playing a Star Trek game, a picture of the ubiquitous starship Enterprise can be seen hanging in the background. [Photo by George Birch, from Benj Edwards, “Inside Computer Stores of the 1970s and 1980s,” July 13, 2022] Given the number of competing computer makers, retailers ultimately had the stronger position in the relationship. Manufacturers who could satisfy the desires of the stores for reliable delivery of stock and robust service and customer support would thrive, while the others withered.[15] But independent dealers faced competition of their own. Chain stores could extract larger volume discounts from manufacturers and build up regional or even national brand recognition. Byte Shop, for example, expanded to fifty locations by March 1978. The most successful chain was ComputerLand, run by the same Bill Millard who had founded IMSAI. Though he later claimed everything was “clean and appropriate,” Millard clearly extracted money and employee time from the declining IMSAI in order to get his new enterprise off the ground. As the company’s chronicler put it, “There was magic in ComputerLand. Started on just Milliard’s $10,000 personal investment, losing $169,000 in its maiden year, the fledgling company required no venture capital or bank loans to get off the ground.” Some small dealers, such as Veit’s Computer Mart, responded by forming a confederacy of independent dealers under a shared front called “XYZ Corporation” that they could use to buy computers with volume discounts.[16] A ComputerLand ad from the February 1978 issue of BYTE. Note that the store offers many of the services that most people could have only found in a club in 1975 or 1976: assistance with assembly, repair, and programming. The Publishers Just like manufacturers, retailers faced their own cash flow risks: outside the holiday season they might suffer from long dry spells without many sales. The early retailers typically solved this by simply not carrying inventory: they took customer orders until they accumulated a batch of ten or so computers from the same manufacturer, then filled all of the orders at once. But a big boon for their cash flow woes came in the form of publications that sold for much less than a computer, but at a much higher and steadier volume, especially the rapidly growing array of computer magazines.[17] BYTE was both the first of the national computer magazines, and the most successful. Launched in New Hampshire in the late summer of 1975, by 1978 it built up a circulation of 140,000 issues per month. It got a head start by cribbing thousands of addresses from the mailing lists of manufacturers such as Nat Wadsworth’s Connecticut-based SCELBI, one of the proto-companies of the pre-Altair era. But, like so much of the hobby computer culture, BYTE also had direct ancestry in the radio electronics hobby.[18] Conflict among the three principal actors has muddled the story of its origins. Wayne Green, publisher of a radio hobby magazine called 73 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, started printing articles about computers in 1974, and found that they were wildly popular. Virginia Londner Green, his ex-wife, worked at the magazine as a business manager. Carl Helmers, a computer enthusiast in Cambridge, Massachusetts, authored and self-published a newsletter about home computers. One of the Greens learned of Helmers’ newsletter, and one or more of the three came up with the idea of combining Helmers’ computer expertise with the infrastructure and know-how from 73 to launch a professional-quality computer hobby magazine.[19] The cover of BYTE‘s September 1976 0.01-centennial issue (i.e., one year anniversary). The phrase “cyber-crud” and the image of a fist on the shirt of the man at center both come from Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Also, these people really liked Star Trek. Within months, for reasons that remain murky, Wayne Green found himself ousted by his ex-wife, who took over publishing of BYTE, with Helmers as editor. Embittered, Green launched a competing magazine, which he wanted to call Kilobyte, but was forced to change to Kilobaud. Thus began a brief period in which Peterborough, with a population of about 4,000, served as a global hub of computer magazine publishing.[20] Another magazine, Personal Computing, spun off from MITS in Albuquerque. Dave Bunnell, hired as a technical writer, had become so fond of running the company newsletter Computer Notes, that he decided to go into publishing on his own. On the West Coast, in addition to the aforementioned Interface Age, there was also Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia—conceived by Stanford lecturer Dennis Allison and computer evangelist Bob Albrecht (Dennis and Bob making “Dobb”), and edited by the hippie-ish Jim Warren, who drifted into computers after being fired from a position teaching math at a Catholic school for holding (widely-publicized) nude parties. Bunnell (right) with Bill Gates. This photo probably dates to sometime in the early 1980s. Computer books also went through a publishing boom. Adam Osborne, born to British parents in Thailand and trained as a chemical engineer, began writing texts for computer companies after losing his job at Shell Oil in California. When Altair arrived, it shook him with the same sense of revelation that so many other computer lovers had experienced. He whipped out a new book, Introduction to Microcomputers, and put it out himself when his previous publishers declined to print it. A highly technical text, full of details on Boolean logic and shift registers, it nonetheless sold 20,000 copies within a year to buyers eager for any information to help them understand and use their new machines.[21] The magazines served several roles. They offered up a cornucopia of content to inform and entertain their readers: industry news, software listings, project ideas, product announcements and reviews, and more. One issue of Interface Age even came with a BASIC implementation inscribed onto a vinyl record, ready to be loaded directly into a computer as if from a cassette reader. The magazines also provided manufacturers with a direct advertising and sales channel to thousands of potential buyers—especially important for smaller makers of computers or computer parts and accessories, whose wares were unlikely to be found in your local store. Finally, they became the primary texts through with the culture of the computer hobbyist was established and promulgated.[22] Each of the magazines had its own distinctive character and personality. BYTE was the magazine for the established hobbyist and tried to cover it all: hardware, software, community news, book reviews, and more. But the hardcore libertarian streak of founding editor Carl Helmers (an avid fan of Ayn Rand) also shone through in the slant of some of its articles. Wayne Green’s Kilobaud, with its spartan cover (title and table of contents only), appealed especially those with an interest in starting a business to make money off of their interest in computers. The short-lived ROM spoke to the humanist hobbyist, offering longer reports and think-pieces. Dr. Dobb’s had an amateur, free-wheeling aesthetic and tone not far removed from an underground newsletter. In keeping with its origins as a vehicle to publish Tiny BASIC (a free Microsoft BASIC alternative), itfocused on software listings. Creative Computing also had a software bent, but as a pre-Altair magazine designed to target users of BASIC in schools and universities, it took a more lighthearted and less technical tone, while Bunnell’s Personal Computing opened its arms to the beginner, with the message that computing was for everyone.[23] The Mythology of the Microcomputer Running through many of these early publications can be found a common narrative, a mythology of the microcomputer. To dramatize it: Until recently, darkness lay over the world of computing. Computers, a font of intellectual power, had served the interests only of the elite few. They lay solely in the hands of large corporate and government bureaucracies. Worse yet, even within those organizations, an inner circle of priests mediated access to the machine: the ordinary layperson could not be allowed to approach it. Then came the computer hobbyist. A Prometheus, a Martin Luther, and a Thomas Jefferson all wrapped into one, he ripped the computer and the knowledge of how to use it from the hands of the priests, sharing freedom and power with the masses. The “priesthood” metaphor came from Ted Nelson’s 1974 book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, but became a powerful means for the post-Altair hobbyist to define himself against what came before. The imagery came to BYTE magazinein an October 1976 article by Mike Wilbur and David Fylstra: The movement towards personalized and individualized computing is an important threat to the aura of mystery that has surrounded the computer for its entire history. Until now, computers were understood by only a select few who were revered almost as befitted the status of priesthood.[24] In this cartoon from Wilbur and Fylstra’s article on the “computer priesthood,” the sinister “HAL” (aka IBM) finds himself chagrined by the spread of hobby computerists. BYTE editor Carl Helmers made the historical connection with the Enlightenment explicit: Personal computing as practiced by large numbers of people will help end the concentration of apparent power in the “in” group of programmers and technicians, just as the enlightenment and renaissance in Europe brought about a much wider understanding beginning in the 14th century.[25] The notion that computing had been jealously guarded by the powerful and kept away from the people can be found as early as June 1975, in the pages Homebrew Computer Club newsletter. In the words of club co-founder Fred Moore: The evidence is overwhelming the people want computers… Why did the Big Companies miss this market? They were busy selling overpriced machines to each other (and the government and military). They don’t want to sell directly to the public.[26] In the first collected volume of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, editor Jim Warren sounded the same theme of a transition from exclusivity to democracy in more eloquent language: …I slowly come to believe that the massive information processing power which has traditionally been available only to the rich and powerful in government and large corporations will truly become available to the general public. And, I see that as having a tremendous democratizing potential, for most assuredly, information–ability to organize and process it–is power. …This is a new and different kind of frontier. We are part of the small cadre of frontiersmen who are exploring it. exploring this new frontier.[27] Personal Computing editor Dave Bunnell further emphasized the potential for the computer as a political weapon against entrenched bureaucracy: …personal computers have already proliferated beyond most government regulation. People already have them, just like (pardon the analogy) people already have hand guns. If you have a computer, use it. It is your equalizer. It is a way to organize and fight back against the impersonal institutions and the catch-22 regulations of modern society.[28] The journalists and social scientists who began to write the first studies of the personal computer in the mid-1980s lapped up this narrative, which provided a heroic framing for the protagonists of their stories. They gave it new life and a much broader audience in books like Silicon Valley Fever (“Until the mid-1970s when the microcomputer burst on the American scene, computers were owned and operated by the establishment–government, big corporations, and other large institutions”) and Fire in the Valley (“Programmers, technicians, and engineers who worked with large computers all had the feeling of being ‘locked out’ of the machine room… there also developed a ‘computer priesthood’… The Altair from MITS breached the machine room door…”)[29] This way of telling the history of the hobby computer gave deeper meaning to a pursuit that looked frivolous on the surface: paying thousands of dollars for a machine to play Star Trek. And, like most myths, it contained elements of truth. There was a large installed base of batch-processing systems, surrounded by a contingent of programmers denied direct access to the machine. Between the two there did stand a group of technicians whose relation to the computer was not unlike the relation of the pre-Vatican II priest to the Eucharist. But in promoting this myth, the computer hobbyists denied their own parentage, obscuring the time-sharing and minicomputer cultures that had made the hobby computer possible and from which it had borrowed most of its ideas. The Altair was not an ex nihilo response to an oppressive IBM batch-processing culture that had made access to computers impossible. The announcement of Altair had called it the “world’s first minicomputer kit”: it was the fulfillment of the dream of owning your own minicomputer, a type of computer most of its buyers had already used. It could not have been successful if thousands of people hadn’t already gotten hooked on the experience of interacting directly with a time-sharing system or minicomputer. This self-confident hobby computer culture, however—with its clubs, its local shops, its magazines, and its myths—would soon be subsumed by a larger phenomenon. From this point forward, no longer will nearly every major character in the story of the personal computer have a background in hobby electronics or ham radio. No longer will nearly all the computer makers and buyers alike be computer lovers who found their passion on mainframe, minicomputer, or time-sharing systems. In 1977, the personal computer entered a new phase of growth, led by a new class of businessmen who targeted the mass market.

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The Switch – Now in Book Form!

My series “The Switch” is now available as a book, in both Kindle and paperback formats. You can find it at Amazon.com here. The book improves upon the original posts in several ways: I have re-edited the entire text (with professional help) to make it flow more smoothly as a book, and to improve correctness and clarity.I have added several professionally-created diagrams to illustrate key points.I have added a longer prologue and conclusion, and (for the print edition) an extensive index.The visual design of the book interior is to a much higher standard than the original posts. Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Like Loading...

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Britain’s Steam Empire

The British empire of the nineteenth century dominated the world’s oceans and much of its landmass: Canada, southern and northeastern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Australia. At its world-straddling Victorian peak, this political and economic machine ran on the power of coal and steam; the same can be said of all the other major powers of the time, from also-ran empires such as France and the Netherlands, to the rising states of Germany and the United States. Two technologies bound the far-flung British empire together, steamships and the telegraph; and the latter, which might seem to represent a new, independent technical paradigm based on electricity, depended on the former. Only steamships, who could adjust course and speed at will regardless of prevailing winds, could effectively lay underwater cable.[1] A 1901 map of the cable network of the Eastern Telegraph Company (which later became Cable & Wireless) shows the pervasive commercial and imperial power of Victorian London. Not just an instrument of imperial power, the steamer also created new imperial appetites: the British empire and others would seize new territories just for the sake of provisioning their steamships and protecting the routes they plied. Within this world system under British hegemony, access to coal became a central economic and strategic factor. As the economist Stanley Jevons wrote in his 1865 treatise on The Coal Question: Day by day it becomes more obvious that the Coal we happily possess in excellent quality and abundance is the Mainspring of Modem Material Civilization. …Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country — the universal aid — the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.[2] Steamboats and the Projection of Power As the states of Atlantic Europe—Portugal and Spain, then later the Netherlands, England, and France—began to explore and conquer along the coasts of Africa and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their cannon-armed ships proved one of their major advantages. Though the states of India and Indonesia had access to their own gunpowder weaponry, they did not have the ship-building technology to build stable firing platforms for large cannon broadsides. The mobile fortresses that the Europeans brought with them allowed them to dominate the sea lanes and coasts, wresting control of the Indian Ocean trade from the local powers.[3] What they could not do, however, was project power inland from the sea. The galleons and later heavily armed ships of the Europeans could not sail upriver. In this era, Europeans rarely could dominate inland states. When it did happen, as in India, it typically required years or decades of warfare and politicking, with the aid of local alliances. The steamboat, however, opened the rivers of Africa and Asia to lightning attacks or shows of force: directly by armed gunboats themselves, or indirectly through armies moving upriver supplied by steam-powered craft. We already know, of course, how Laird used steamboats in his expedition up the Niger in 1832. Although his intent was purely commercial, not belligerent, he had demonstrated the that interior of Africa could be navigated with steam. When combined with quinine to protect European settlers from malaria, the steamboat would help open a new wave of imperial claims on African territory. But even before Laird’s expedition, the British empire had begun to experiment with the capabilities of riverine steamboats. British imperial policy in Asia still operated under the corporate auspices of the East India Company (EIC), not under the British government, and in 1824 the EIC went to war with Burma over control of territories between the Burmese Empire and British India, in what is now Bangladesh. It so happened that the company had several steamers on hand, built in the dockyards of Calcutta (now Kolkata), and the local commanders put them to work in war service (much as Andrew Jackson had done with Shreve’s Enterprise in 1814).[4] Most impressive was Diana, which penetrated 400 miles up the Irrawaddy to the Burmese imperial capital at Amarapura: “she towed sailing ships into position, transported troops, reconnoitered advance positions, and bombarded Burmese fortifications with her swivel guns and Congreve rockets.”[5] She also captured the Burmese warships, who could not outrun her and whose small cannons on fixed mounts could not effectively put fire on her either. A depiction of an attack on Burmese fortifications by the British fleet. The steamship Diana is at right. In the Burmese war, however, steamships had served as the supporting cast. In the First Opium War, the steamship Nemesis took a star turn. The East India Company traditionally made its money by bringing the goods of the East—mainly tea, spices, and cotton cloth—back west to Europe. In the nineteenth century, however, the directors had found an even more profitable way to extract money from their holdings in the subcontinent: by growing poppies and trading the extracted drug even further east, to the opium dens of China. The Qing state, understandably, grew to resent this trade that immiserated its citizens, and so in 1839 the emperor promulgated a ban on the drug. The iron-hulled Nemesis was built and dispatched to China by the EIC with the express purpose of carrying war up China’s rivers. Shemounted a powerful main battery of twin swivel-mount 32-pounders and numerous smaller weapons, and with a shallow draft was able to navigate not just up the Pearl River, but into the shallow waterways around Canton (Guangzhou), destroying fortifications and ships and wreaking general havoc. Later Nemesis and several other steamers, towing other battleships, brought British naval power 150 miles up the Yangtze to its junction with the Grand Canal. The threat to this vital economic lifeline brought the Chinese government to terms.[6] Nemesis and several British boats destroying a fleet of Chinese junks in 1841. Steamboats continued to serve in imperial wars throughout the nineteenth century. A steam-powered naval force dispatched from Hong Kong helped to break the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Steamers supplied Herbert Kitchener’s 1898 expedition up the Nile to the Sudan, with the dual purpose of avenging the death of Charles “Chinese” Gordon fourteen years earlier and of preventing the French from securing a foothold on the Nile. His steamboat force consisted of a mix of naval gunboats and a civilian ship requisitioned from the ubiquitous Cook & Son tourism and logistics firm.[7] Kitchener could only dispatch such an expedition because of the British power base in Cairo (from whence it ruled Egypt through a puppet khedive), and that power base existed for one primary reason: to protect the Suez Canal. The Geography of Steam: Suez In 1798, Napoleon’s army of conquest, revolution, and Enlightenment arrived in Egypt with the aim of controlling the Eastern half of the Mediterranean and cutting off Britain’s overland link to India. There they uncovered the remnants of a canal linking the Nile Delta to the Red Sea. Constructed in antiquity and restored several times after, it had fallen into disuse sometime in the medieval period. It’s impossible to know for certain, but when operable, this canal had probably served as a regional waterway connecting the Egyptian heartland around the Nile with the lands around the head of the Red Sea. By the eighteenth century, in an age of global commerce and global empires, however, a nautical connection between the Mediterranean and Red Sea had more far-reaching implications.[8] A reconstruction of the possible location of the ancient Nile-Suez canal. [Picture by Annie Brocolie / CC BY-SA 2.5] Napoleon intended to restore the canal, but before any work could commence, France’s forces in Egypt withdrew in the face of a sustained Anglo-Ottoman assault. Though British commercial and imperial interests presented a far stronger case for a canal than any benefits France might have hoped to get from it, the British government fretted about upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East and disrupting their textile industry’s access to the Egyptian cotton cloth. They contented themselves instead with a cumbrous overland route to link the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, a series of French engineers and diplomats, culminating in Ferdinand de Lesseps, pressed for the concession required to build a sea-to-sea Suez Canal, and construction under French engineers finally began in 1861. The route formally opened in November, 1869 in a grand celebration that attracted most of the crowned heads of continental Europe.[9] It was just as well that the project was delayed: it allowed for the substitution, in 1865, of steam dredges for conscripted labor at the work site. Of the hundred million cubic yards of earth excavated for the canal, four-fifths were dug out with iron and steam rather than muscle, generating 10,000 horsepower at the cost of £20,000 of coal per month.[10] Without mechanical aid, the project would have dragged on well into the 1870s, if it were completed at all. Moreover, Napoleon’s precocious belief in the project notwithstanding, the canal’s ultimate fiscal health depended of the existence of ocean-going steamships as well. By sail, depending on the direction of travel and the season, the powerful trade winds on the southern route could make it the faster option, or at least the more efficient one given the tolls on the canal.[11] But for a steamship, the benefits of cutting off thousands of miles from the journey were three-fold: it didn’t just save time, it also saved fuel, which in turn freed more space for cargo. Given the tradeoffs, as historian Max Fletcher wrote, “[a]lmost without exception, the Suez Canal was an all-steamer route.”[12] The modern Suez Canal, with the Mediterranean Sea on the left and the Red Sea on the right. [Picture by Pierre Markuse / CC BY 2.0] Ironically, the British, too conservative in their instincts to back the canal project, would nonetheless derive far more obvious benefit from it than the French government or investors, who struggled to make their money back in the early years of the canal. The new canal became the lifeline to the empire in India and beyond. This new channel for the transit of people and goods was soon complemented by an even more rapid channel for the transmission of intelligence. The first great achievement of the global telegraph age was the transatlantic cable laid in 1866 by Brunel’s Great Eastern, whose cavernous bulk allowed it to lay the entire line from Ireland to Newfoundland in a single piece in 1866.[13] This particular connection served mainly commercial interests, but the Great Eastern went on to participate in the laying of a cable from Suez to Aden and on to Bombay in 1870, providing relatively instantaneous electric communication (modulo a few intermediate hops) from London to its most precious imperial possession.[14] The importance of the Suez for quick communications with India in turn led to further aggressive British expansion in 1882: the bombarding of Alexandria and the de facto conquest of an Egypt still nominally loyal to the Sultan in Istanbul. This was not the only such instance. Steam power opened up new ways for empires to exert their might, but also pulled them to new places sought out only because steam power itself had made them important. The Geography of Steam: Coaling Stations In that vein, coaling stations—coastal and island stations for restocking ships with fuel—became an essential component of global empire. In 1839, the British seized the port of Aden (on the gulf of the same name) from the Sultan of Lahej for exactly that purpose, to serve as a coaling station for the steamers operating between the Red Sea and India.[15] Other, pre-existing waystations waxed or waned in importance along with the shift from the geography of sail to that of steam. St. Helena in the Atlantic, governed by the East India Company since the 1650s, could only be of use to ships returning from Asia in the age of sail, due to the prevailing trade winds that pushed outbound ships towards South America. The advent of steam made an expansion of St. Helena’s role possible, but then the opening of Suez diverted traffic away from the South Atlantic altogether. The opening of the Panama Canal similarly eclipsed the Falkland Islands’ position as the gateway to the Pacific.[16] In the case of shore-bound stations such as Aden, the need to protect the station itself sometimes led to new imperial commitments in its hinterlands, pulling empire onward in the service of steam. Aden’s importance only multiplied with the opening of the Suez Canal, which now made it part of the seven-thousand-mile relay system between Great Britain and India. Aggressive moves by the Ottoman Empire seemed to imperil this lifeline, and so the existence of the station became the justification for Britain to create a protectorate (a collection of vassal states, in effect) over 100,000 square miles of the Arabian Peninsula.[17] Britain created the 100,000-square-mile Aden protectorate to safeguard its steamship route to India. Coaling stations acquired local coal where it was available—from North America, South Africa, Bengal, Borneo, or Australia—where it was not, it had to be brought in, ironically, by sailing ships. But although one lump of coal may seem as good as another, it was not, in fact, a single fungible commodity. Each seam varied in the ratio and types of chemical impurities it contained, which affected how the coal burned. Above all, the Royal Navy was hungry for the highest quality coal. By the 1850s, the British Admiralty determined that a hard coal from the deeper layers of certain coal measures in South Wales exceeded all others in the qualities required for naval operations: a maximum of energy and a minimum of residues that would dirty engines and black smoke that would give away the position of their ships over the horizon. In 1871 the Navy launched its first all-steam oceangoing warship, the HMS Devastation, which needed, at full bore, 150 tons of this top-notch coal per day, without which it would become “the verist hulk in the navy.” The coal mines lining a series of north-south valleys along the Bristol Channel, which had previously supplied the local iron industry, thus became part of a global supply chain. The Admiralty demanded access to imported Welsh coal across the globe, in every port where the Navy refueled, even where local supplies could be found.[18] The dark green area indicates the coal seams of South Wales, where the best  steam coal in the world could be found. The British supply network far exceeded that of any other nation in its breadth and reliability, which gave their navy a global operational capacity that no other fleet could match. When the Russians sent their Baltic fleet to attack Japan in 1905, the British refused it coaling service and pressured the French to do likewise, leaving the ships reliant on sub-par German supplies. It suffered repeated delays and quality shortfalls in its coal before meeting its grim fate in Tsushima Strait. Aleksey Novikov-Priboi, a sailor on one of the Russian ships, later wrote that “coal had developed into an idol, to which we sacrificed strength, health, and comfort. We thought only in terms of coal, which had become a sort of black veil hiding all else, as if the business of the squadron had not been to fight, but simply to get to Japan.”[19] Even the rising naval power of the United States, stoked by the dreams of Alfred Mahan, could scarcely operate outside its home waters without British sufferance. The proud Great White Fleet of the United States that circumnavigated the globe to show the flag found itself repeatedly humbled by the failures of its supply network, reliant on British colliers or left begging for low-quality local supplies.[20] But if British steam power on the oceans still outshone that of the U.S. even beyond the turn of the twentieth century, on land it was another matter, as we shall next time.

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Steam Revolution: The Turbine

Incandescent electric light did not immediately snuff out all of its rivals: the gas industry fought back with its own incandescent mantle (which used the heat of the gas to induce a glow in another material) and the arc lighting manufacturers with a glass-enclosed arc bulb.[1] Nonetheless, incandescent lighting grew at an astonishing pace: the U.S. alone had an estimated 250,000 such lights in use by 1885, three million by 1890 and 18 million by the turn of the century.[2] Edison’s electric light company expanded rapidly across the U.S. and into Europe, and its success encouraged the creation of many competitors. An organizational division gradually emerged between manufacturing companies that built equipment and supply companies that used it to generate and deliver power to customers. A few large competitors came to dominate the former industry: Westinghouse Electric and General Electric (formed from the merger of Edison’s company with Thomson-Houston) in the U.S., and the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) and Siemens in Germany. In a sign of its gradual relative decline, Britain produced only a few smaller firms, such as Charles Parsons’ C. A. Parsons and Company—of whom more later.  In accordance with Edison’s early imaginings, manufacturers and suppliers expanded beyond lighting to general-purpose electrical power, especially electric motors and electric traction (trains, subways, and street cars). These new fields opened up new markets for users: electric motors, for example, enabled small-scale manufacturers who lacked the capital for a steam engine or water wheel to consider mechanization, while releasing large-scale factories from the design constraints of mechanical power transmission. They also provided electrical supply companies with a daytime user base to balance the nighttime lighting load. The demands of this growing electric power industry pushed steam engine design to its limits. Dynamos typically rotated hundreds of times a minute, several times the speed of a typical steam engine drive shaft. Engineers overcame this with belt systems, but these gave up energy to friction. Faster engines that could drive a dynamo directly required new high-speed valve control machinery, new cooling and lubrication systems to withstand the additional friction, and higher steam pressures more typical of marine engines than factories. That, in turn, required new boiler designs like the Babcock and Wilcox, which could operate safely at pressures well over 100 psi.[3] A high-speed steam engine (made by the British firm Willans) directly driving a dynamo (the silver cylinder at left). From W. Norris and Ben. H. Morgan, High Speed Steam Engines, 2nd edition (London: P.S. King & Son, 1902), 13. But the requirement that ultimately did in the steam engine was not for speed, but for size. As the electric supply companies evolved into large-scale utilities, providing power and light to whole urban centers and then beyond, they demanded more and more output from their power houses. Even Edison’s Pearl Street station, a tiny installation when looking back from the perspective of the turn of the century, required multiple engines to supply it. By 1903, the Westminster Electric Supply Corporation, which supplied only a part of London’s power, required forty-nine Willans engines in three stations to provide about 9 megawatts of power (an average of about 250 horsepower an engine). But demand continued to grow, and engines grew in response. Perhaps the largest steam engines ever built were the 12,000 horsepower giants designed by Edwin Reynolds and installed in 1901 for the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company and in 1904 for the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway company. Each of these engines actually consisted of two compound engines grafted together, each with its own high- and low-pressure cylinder, set at right angles to give eight separate impulses per rotation to the spinning alternator (an alternating current dynamo). The combined unit, engine and alternator, weighed 720 tons. But the elevated railway required eight of these monsters, and the IRT expected to need eleven to meet its power needs. The IRT’s power house, with a Renaissance Revival façade designed by famed architect Stanford White, filled a city block near the Hudson River (where it still stands today).[4] The inside of the IRT power house, with five engines installed. Each engine consists of two towers, with a disc-shaped dynamo between them. From Scientific American, October 29th, 1904. How much farther the reciprocating steam engine might have been coaxed to grow is hard to say with certainty, because even as the IRT powerhouse was going up in Manhattan, it was being overtaken by a new power technology based on whirling rotors instead of cycling pistons, the steam turbine. This great advancement in steam power borrowed from developments that had been brewing for decades in its most long-standing rival, water power. Niagara The signature electrical project of the turn of the twentieth century was the Niagara Falls Power Company. The immense scale of its works, its ambitions to distribute power over dozens of miles, its variety of prospective customers, and its adoption of alternating current: all signaled that the era of local, Pearl Street-style direct-current electric light plants was drawing to a close. The tremendous power latent in Niagara’s roaring cataract as it dropped from the level of Lake Erie to that of Lake Ontario was obvious to any observer—engineers estimated its potential horsepower in the millions—the problem was how to capture it, and where to direct it. By the late nineteenth century, several mills had moved to draw off some of its power locally. But Niagara could power thousands of factories, with each having to dig its own canals, tunnels and wheel pits to draw off the small fraction of waterfall that it required. New York State law, moreover, forbid development in the immediate vicinity of the falls to protect its scenic beauty. The solution ultimately decided on was to supply power to users from a small number of large-scale power plants, and the largest nearby pool of potential users lay in Buffalo, about twenty miles away.[5] The Niagara project originated in the 1886 designs of New York State engineer Thomas Evershed for a canal and tunnel lined with hundreds of wheel pits to supply power to an equal number of local factories. But the plan took a different direction in 1889 after securing the backing of a group of New York financiers, headed once again by J.P. Morgan. The Morgan group consulted a wide variety of experts in North America and Europe before settling on an electric power system as the best alternative, despite the unproven nature of long-distance electric power transmission. This proved a good bet: by 1893, Westinghouse had proved in California that it could deliver high-voltage alternating current over dozens of miles, convincing the Niagara company to adopt the same model.[6] Cover of the July 22, 1899 issue of Scientific American with multiple views of the first Niagara Falls Power Company power house and its five-thousand-horsepower turbine-driven generators. By 1904, the company had completed canals, vertical shafts for the fall of water, two powerhouses with a total capacity of 110,000 horsepower, and a mile-long discharge tunnel. They supplied power to local industrial plants, the city of Buffalo, and a wide swath of New York State and Ontario.[7] The most important feature of the power plant for our story, however, were the Westinghouse generators driven by water turbines, each with a capacity of 5,000 horsepower each. As Terry Reynolds, a historian of the waterwheel, put it, this was “more than ten times [the capacity] of the most powerful vertical wheel ever built.”[8] Water turbines had made possible the exploitation of water power on a previously inconceivable scale; appropriately so, for they originated from a hunger on the European continent for a power that could match British steam. Water Turbines The exact point at which a water wheel becomes a turbine is somewhat arbitrary; a turbine is simply a kind of water wheel that has reached a degree of efficiency and power that earlier designs could not approach. But the distinction most often drawn is in terms of relative motion: the water in a traditional wheel pushes the vane along with the same speed and direction as its own flow (like a person pushing a box along the floor). A turbine, on the other hand, creates “motion of the water relative to the buckets or floats of the wheel” in order to extract additional energy: that is to say, it uses the kinetic energy of the water as well as its weight or pressure. That can occur through either impulse (pressing water against the turning vanes), or reaction (shooting water out from them to cause them to turn) but very often includes a combination of both.[9] The exact origins of the horizontal water wheel are unknown, but they had been used in Europe since at least the late Middle Ages. They offered by far the simplest way to drive a millstone, since it could be attached directly to the wheel without any gearing, and remained in wide use in poorer regions of the continent well into the modern period. For centuries, the manufacturers and engineers of Western Europe focused their attention on the more powerful and efficient vertical water wheel, and this type constitutes most of our written record of water technology. Going back to the Renaissance, however, descriptions and drawings can be found of horizontal wheels with curved vanes intended to capture more of the flow of water, and it was the application of rigorous engineering to this general idea that led to the modern turbine. The turbine was in this sense the revenge of the horizontal water wheel, transforming the most low-tech type of water wheel into the most sophisticated. All of the early development of the water turbine occurred in France, which could draw on a deep well of hydraulic theory but could not so easily access coal and iron to make steam as could their British neighbors. Bernard Forest de Belidor, an eighteenth-century French engineer, recorded in his 1737 treatise on hydraulic engineering the existence of some especially ingenious horizontal wheels, used to grind flour at Bascale on the Garonne. They had curved blades fitted inside a surrounding barrel and angled like the blades of a windmill, such that “the water that pushes it works it with the force of its weight composed with the circular motion given to it by the barrel…”[10] Nothing much came of this observation for another century, but Belidor had identified what we could call a proto-turbine, where water not only pushed on the vanes but also glided down through them like the breeze on the arms of a windmill, capturing more of its energy. The horizontal mill wheels observed on the Garonne by Belidor. From Belidor, Architecture hydraulique vol. 1, part 2, Plan 5. In the meantime, theorists came to an important insight. Jean-Charles de Borda, another French engineer (there will be a lot of them in this part of the story), was only a small child in a spa town just north of the Pyrenees when Belidor was writing about water wheels. He studied mathematics and wrote mathematical treatises, became an engineer for the Army and then the Navy, undertook several scientific voyages, fought in the American Revolutionary War, and headed the commission that established the standard length of the meter. In the midst of all this he found some time in 1767 to write up a study on hydraulics for the French Academy of Sciences, in which he articulated the principle that, to extract the most power from a water wheel, the water should enter the machine without shock and leave it without velocity. Lazare Carnot, father of Sadi, restated this principle some fifteen years later, in a treatise that reached a wider audience than de Borda’s paper.[11] Though it is obviously impossible for the water to literally leave the wheel without velocity (for after all without velocity it would never leave), it was through striving for this imaginary ideal that engineers developed the modern, highly efficient water turbine. First came Jean-Victor Poncelet (from now on, if I mention someone, just assume they are French), another military engineer who had accompanied Napoleon’s Grande Armée into Russia in 1812, where he ended up a prisoner of war for two years. After returning home to Metz he became the professor of mechanics at the local military engineering academy. While there he turned his mind to vertical water wheels, and a long-standing tradeoff in their design: undershot wheels, in which the water passed under the wheel, were cheaper to construct but not very efficient, while overshot wheels, where the water came to the top of the wheel and fell on its vanes or buckets, had the opposite attributes. Poncelet combined the virtues of both by applying the principle of de Borda and Carnot. The traditional undershot waterwheel had a maximum theoretical efficiency of 50%, because the ideal wheel turned at half the speed of the water current, allowing the water to leave the vanes of the wheel behind with half of its initial velocity. The appearance of cheap sheet iron had made it possible to substitute metal vanes for wooden, and iron vanes could easily be bent in a curve. By curving the vanes of the wheel just so towards the incoming water, Poncelet found that it would run up the cupped vane, expending all of its velocity, and then fall out of the bottom of the wheel.[12] He published his idea in 1825 to immediate acclaim: “no other paper on water-wheels… had proved so interesting and commanded such attention.”[13] The Poncelet water wheel. Poncelet’s advance hinted at the possibility of a new water-powered industrial future for France. His wheel design soon became a common sight in a France eager to develop its industrial might, and richer in falling water than in reserves of coal. It inspired the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, an organization founded in 1801 to push France to be more industrially competitive with Britain, to offer a prize of 6,000 francs to anyone who “would apply on a large scale, in a satisfactory manner, in factories and manufacturing works, the water turbines or wheels with curved blades of Belidor.” The revenge of the horizontal wheel was at hand.[14] Benoît Fourneyron, an engineer at a water-powered ironworks in the hilly country near the Swiss border, claimed the prize in 1833. Even before the announcement of the prize, he had, in fact, already undertaken a deep study of hydraulic theory, reading up on Borda and his successors. He had devised and tested an improved “Belidor-style” wheel, applying the curved metal vanes of Poncelet to a horizontal wheel situated in a barrel-shaped pit, which we can fairly call the first modern water turbine. He went on to install over a hundred of these turbines around Europe, but his signal achievement was the 1837 spinning mill amid the hills of the Black Forest in Baden, which took in a head of water falling over 350 feet and generated sixty horsepower at 80% efficiency. The spinning rotor of the turbine responsible for this power was a mere foot across and weighed only forty pounds. A traditional wheel could neither take on such a head of water nor derive so much power, so efficiently, from such a compact machine.[15] The Fourneyron turbine. The inflowing water, from the reservoir A drives the rotor before emptying from its radial exterior into the basin D. From Eugène Armengaud, Traité théorique et pratique des moteurs hydrauliques et a vapeur, nouvelle edition (Paris: Armengaud, 1858), 279. Steam Turbines The water turbine was thus a far smaller and more efficient machine than its ancestor, the traditional water wheel. Its basic form had existed since at least the time of Belidor, but to achieve an efficient, high-speed design like Fourneyron’s required a body of engineers deeply educated in mathematical physics and a surrounding material culture capable of realizing those mathematical ideas in precisely machined metal. It also required a social context in which there existed demand for more power than traditional sources could ever provide: in this case, a France racing to catch up with rapidly industrializing Britain. The same relation held between the steam turbine and the reciprocating steam engine: the former could be much more compact and efficient, but put much higher demands on the precision of its design and construction. It was no great leap to imagine that steam could drive a turbine in the same way that water did: through the reaction against or impulse from moving steam. One could even look to some centuries-old antecedents for inspiration: the steam-jet reaction propulsion of Heron’s of Alexandria’s whirling “engine” (mentioned much earlier in this history), or a woodcut in Giovanni Branca’s seventeenth-century Le Machine, which showed the impulse of a steam jet driving a horizontal paddlewheel.   But it is one thing to make a demonstration or draw a picture, and another to make a useful power source. A steam turbine presented a far harder problem than a water turbine, because steam was so much less dense than liquid water. Simply transplanting steam into a water turbine design would be like blowing on a pinwheel: it would spin, but generate little power.[16] The difficulty was clear even in the eighteenth century: when confronted in 1784 with reports of a potential rival steam engine driven by the reaction created by a jet of steam, James Watt calculated that, given the low relative density of steam, the jet would have to shoot from the ends of the rotor at 1,300 feet per second, and thus “without god makes it possible for things to move 1000 feet [per second] it can not do much harm.” As historian of steam Henry Dickinson epitomized Watt’s argument, “[t]he analysis of the problem is masterly and the conclusion irrefutable.”[17] Even when future generations of metal working made the speeds required appear more feasible, one could get nowhere with traditional “cut and try” techniques with ordinary physical tools; the problem demanded careful analysis with the precision tools offered by mathematics and physics.[18] Dozens of inventors took a crack at the problem, nonetheless, including another famed steam engine designer, Richard Trevithick. None found success. Though Fourneyron had built an effective water turbine in the 1830s, the first practical steam turbines did not appear until the 1880s: a time when metallurgy and machine tools had achieved new heights (with mass-produced steels of various grades and qualities available) and a time when even the steam engine was beginning to struggle to sate modern society’s demand for power. It first appeared in two places more or less at once: Sweden and Britain. Gustaf de Laval burst from his middle-class background in the Swedish provinces into the engineering school at Uppsala with few friends but many grandiose dreams: he was the protagonist in his own heroic tale of Swedish national greatness, the engineering genius who would propel Sweden into the first rank of great nations. He lived simultaneously in grand style and constant penury, borrowing from his visions for an ever more prosperous tomorrow to live beyond his means of today. In the 1870s, while working a day job at a glassworks, he developed two inventions based on centrifugal force generated by a rapidly spinning wheel. The first, a bottle-making machine, flopped, but the second, a cream separator, became the basis for a successful business that let him leave his day job behind.[19] Then, in 1882 he patented a turbine powered by a jet of steam directed at a spinning wheel. De Laval claimed that his inspiration came from seeing a nozzle used for sandblasting at the glassworks come loose and whip around, unleashing its powerful jet into the air; it is also not hard to see some continuity in his interest in high-speed rotation. De Laval used his whirling turbines to power his whirling cream separators, and then acquired an electric light company, giving himself another internal customer for turbine power.[20] Though superficially similar to de Branca’s old illustration, de Laval’s machine was far more sophisticated. As Watt had calculated a century earlier, the low density of steam demanded high rotational speeds (otherwise the steam would escape from the machine having given up very little energy to the wheel) and thus a very high-velocity jet: de Laval’s steel rotor spun at tens of thousands of rotations per minute in an enclosed housing. A few years later he invented an hourglass-shaped nozzle to propel the steam jet to supersonic speeds, a shape that is still used in rocket engines for the same purpose today. Despite the more advanced metallurgy of the late-nineteenth century, however, de Laval still ran up against its limits: he could not run his turbine at the most efficient possible speed without burning out his bearings and reduction gear, and so his turbines didn’t fully capture their potential efficiency advantage over a reciprocating engine.[21] Cutaway view of a de Laval turbine, from William Ripper, Heat Engines (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), 234. Meanwhile, the British engineer Charles Parsons came up with a rather different approach to extracting energy from the steam, which didn’t require such rapid rotation. Whereas De Laval strove up from the middle class, Parsons came from the highest gentry. Son of the third Earl of Rosse, he grew up in a castle in Ireland, with grounds that included a lake and a sixty-foot-long telescope constructed to his father’s specifications. He studied at home under, Robert Ball, who later became the Astronomer Royal of Ireland, then went on to graduate from Cambridge University in 1877 as eleventh wrangler—the eleventh best in his class on the mathematics exams.[22] Despite his noble birth, Parsons appeared determined to find his own way in the world. He apprenticed himself at Elswick Works, a manufacturer of heavy construction and mining equipment and military ordnance in Newcastle on Tyne. He spent a couple years with a partner in Leeds trying to develop rocket-powered torpedoes before taking up as a junior partner at another heavy engineering concern, Clarke Chapman in Gateshead (back on the River Tyne).[23] His new bosses directed Parsons away from torpedoes toward the rapidly growing field of electric lighting. He turned to the turbine concept in search of a high-speed rotor that could match the high rotational speeds of a dynamo. Parsons came up with a different solution for the density problem than Laval’s. Rather than try to extract as much power as possible from the steam jet with one extremely fast rotor, he would send the steam through a series of rotors arranged horizontally. They would then not have to spin so quickly (though Parson’s first prototype still ran at 18,000 rotations per minute), and each could extract a bit of energy from the steam as it flowed through the turbine, dropping in pressure. This design extended the two-or three- stages of pressure reduction in a multi-cylinder steam engine into a continuous flow across a dozen or more rotors. Parsons’ approach created some new challenges (keeping the long, rapidly spinning shaft from bowing too far in one direction or the other, for example) but ultimately most future steam turbines would copy this elongated form.[24] Parson’s original prototype turbine and dynamo, with the top removed. Steam entered at the center and exited from both ends, which eliminated the need to deal with “end thrust,” a force pushing on one end of the turbine. From Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine, plate vii. The Rise of Turbines Parsons soon founded his own firm to exploit the turbine. Because it has far less inherent friction than the piston of a traditional engine, and because none of its parts have to touch both hot and cold steam, a turbine had the potential to be much more efficient, but they didn’t start out that way. So his early customers were those who cared mainly about the smaller size of turbines: shipbuilders looking to put in electric lighting without adding too much weight or using too much space in the hull. In other applications reciprocating engines still won out.[25] Further refinements, however, allowed turbines to start to supplant reciprocating engines in electrical systems more generally: more efficient blade designs, the addition of a regulator to ensure that steam entered the turbine only at full pressure, the superheating of steam at one end and the condensing of it at the other to maximize the fall in temperature across the entire engine. Turbo-generators—electrical dynamos driven by turbines—began to find buyers in the 1890s. By 1896, Parsons could boast that a two-hundred-horsepower turbine his firm constructed for a Scottish electric power station ran at 98% of its ideal efficiency, and Westinghouse had begun to develop turbines under license in the United States.[26] Cutaway view of a fully developed Parsons-style turbine. Steam enters at left (A) and passes through the rotors to the right. From Ripper, Heat Engines, 241. At the same time, Parsons was pushing for the construction of ships with turbine powerplants, starting with the prototype Turbinia, which drove nine propellers with three turbines and achieved a top speed of nearly forty miles-per-hour. Suitably impressed, the British Admiralty ordered turbine-powered destroyers (starting with Viper in 1897), but the real turning point came in 1906 with the completion of the first turbine-driven battleship (Dreadnought) and transatlantic steamers (Lusitania and Muaretania), all supplied with Parsons powerplants.[27] HMS Dreadnought was remarkable not only for her armament and armor, but also for her speed of 21 knots (24 miles per hour), made possible by Parsons turbines. The very first steam turbines had demonstrated their advantage over traditional engines in size; a further decade-and-a-half of development allowed them to realize their potential advantages in efficiency; and now these massive vessels made clear their third advantage: the ability to scale to enormous power outputs. As we saw, the monster steam engines at the subway power house in New York could generate 12,000 horsepower, but the turbines aboard Lusitiania churned out half again as much, and that was far from the limit of what was possible. In 1915, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, facing ever-growing demand for power with the addition of a third (express) track to its elevated lines, installed three 40,000 horsepower turbines for electrical generation, obsoleting Reynolds’ monster engines of a decade earlier. By the 1920s, 40,000 horsepower turbines were being built in the U.S., and burning half as much coal per watt of power generated as the most efficient reciprocating engines.[28] Parsons lived to see the triumph of his creation. He spent his last years cruising the world, and preferred to spend the time between stops talking shop with the crew and engineers rather than lounging with other wealthy passengers. He died in 1931, at age 76, in the Caribbean while aboard ship on the (turbine-powered of course) Duchess of Richmond.[29] Meanwhile, power usage shifted towards electricity, made widely available by the growth of steam and water turbines and the development of long-distance power transmission, not by traditional steam engines. Niagara was just a foretaste of the large-scale water power projects made feasible by the newly found capacity to transmit that power wherever it was needed: the Hoover Dam and Tennessee Valley Authority in the U.S., the Rhine power dams in Europe, and later projects intended to spur the modernization of poorer countries, from the Aswan Dam on the Nile and the Gezhouba Dam on the Yangtze. In regions with easy access to coal, however, steam turbines provided the majority of all electric power until far in the twentieth century. Cheap electricity transformed industry after industry. By 1920, manufacturing consumed half of the electricity produced in the U.S., mainly through dedicated electric motors at each tool, eliminating the need for the construction and maintenance of a large, heavy steam engine and for bulky and friction-heavy shafts and belts to transmit power through the factory. The capital barriers to starting a new manufacturing plant thus dropped substantially along with the recurring cost of paying for power, and the way was opened to completely rethink how manufacturing plants were built and operated. Factories became cleaner, safer, and more pleasant to work in, and the ability to organize machines according to the most efficient work process rather than the mechanical constraints of power delivery produced huge dividends in productivity.[30] A typical pre-electricity factory power distribution system, based on line shafts and belts (in this case driving power looms). All the machines in the factory have to be organized around the driveshafts. [Z22, CC BY-SA 3.0] The 1910 Ford Highland Park plant represents a hybrid stage on the way to full electrification of every machine; the plant still had overhead line shafts (here for milling engine blocks), but each area was driven by a local electric motor, allowing for a much more flexible arrangement of machinery. By that time, the heyday of the piston-driven steam engine was over. For large-scale installations, it could no longer compete with turbines (whether powered by liquid water or steam). At the same time, feisty new competitors, diesel and gasoline engines, were gnawing away at its share of the lower horsepower market. The warning shot fired by the air engine had finally caught up to steam. It could not outrun thermodynamics, and the incredibly energy-dense new fuel source that had come bubbling up out of the ground: rock oil, or petroleum.

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High Pressure, Part 2: The First Steam Railway

Railways long predate the steam locomotive. Trackways with grooves to keep a wheeled cart on a fixed path date back to antiquity (such as the Diolkos, which could carry a naval vessel across the Isthmus of Corinth on a wheeled truck). The earliest evidence for carts running atop wooden rails, though, comes from the mining districts of sixteenth century Europe. Agricola describes a kind of primitive railway used by German miners in his 1556 treatise De Re Metallica. Agricola reports that the miners ran trucks called Hunds (“dogs”) (supposedly because of the barking noise they made while in motion) over two parallel wooden planks. A metal pin protruding down from the truck into the gap between the planks kept it from rolling off the track.[1] This system allowed a laborer to carry far more material out of the mine in a single trip than they could by carrying it themselves. British Railways Wooden railways called “waggon ways” are first attested in the coal-mining areas of Britain around 1600. These differed in two important ways from earlier mining carts: first, they ran outside the mine, carrying coal a short distance (perhaps a mile or two) to the nearest high-quality road or navigable waterway from which it could be brough to market. Second, they were drawn by horses, at least on the uphill courses—on some eighteenth-century wagon ways, the horse actually caught a ride downhill, standing on a flat carriage behind the cart. Flanged wheels to keep the wagon on the track were also probably introduced around this time. Both wheels and rails were still constructed of wood, however, which limited the load the wagons could carry.[2] By the middle of the eighteenth century, waggon ways crisscrossed the mining districts of northern England, especially around the coalfields, creating a substantial trade in birch wheels and rails of beech or ash from the South. They were called by many different names, such as “gangways,” “plateways,” “tramways,” or “tramroads.” Colliers invested sophisticated engineering into their design, using bridges, causeways, and tunnels to create a smooth grade from the pithead to the point of embarkation (such as the Tyne or the Severn rivers).[3] Most were no more than a mile or two long, but some ran as far as ten miles. They were smooth enough that a single horse could haul several times on rails what it could on an ordinary eighteenth-century road: the figures given by various sources for the load of a horse-drawn rail carriage range from two to ten tons, likely depending on the grade of the railway and the material composition of the rails and wheels.[4] The Little Eaton Gangway, a railway built in the 1790s, that, incredibly, continued to operate until 1908, when this photo was taken. It carried coal five miles down to the Derby Canal. This close-up of the Little Eaton Gangway shows clearly the design of the railbed, with L-shaped rails to hold the wagon on the track, and stone blocks underneath to which they were nailed. The Penydarren railway, discussed below, had the same design. This may seem prologue enough, but two further milestones in the development of railways still intervened before the steam locomotive came into the picture. Around the late 1760s, the Darbys of Coalbrookdale step into our history once more. They are reputed to have been the first to introduce durable cast iron plates to strengthen the rails that they used to carry materials among their various Shropshire properties.[5] Later the Darbys and others introduced fully cast-iron rails, doing away with wood altogether. With this change in material the railways of England (already intimately linked with coal mining) now became fully enmeshed in the cycle of the triumvirate—coal, iron, and steam—well before they became steam-powered. Then, in 1799, came the first public horse-drawn railway. Up to this time, all railways  served the needs of a single owner (though some required an easement across neighboring properties), typically a mining concern. But the Surrey Iron Railway, which ran from Croydon (south of London) up to the Thames at Wandsworth, was open to any paying cargo, much like a turnpike road or a canal. Among the backers of the Surrey Iron Railway was a Midlands colliery owner, William James, who will have an important part to play later in our story.[6] So, although we think of them now as two components of a single technological system, the locomotive and the railway did not start out that way. Instead, the locomotive appeared on the scene as an alternative way of hauling freight over an already familiar and well-established transportation medium. Trevithick Richard Trevithick was the first Englishman to attempt this substitution. He was born in 1771, in the heart of the copper-mining region of Cornwall. His birthplace, the village of Illogan, sat beneath the weathered hill of Carn Brea, said to be the ancient dwelling place of a giant.[7] But the only giants still found upon the landscape of eighteenth-century Cornwall breathed steam. They sheltered in the stone engine houses that still dot the countryside today, and raised water from the bottom of the mine, allowing the proprietors to delve ever deeper into the earth. Trevithick’s father was a mine “captain,” a high-status position with the responsibilities of a general manager and some of the same cachet among the mining community as a sea captain would have in a nautical community. This included the privilege of an honorific title: he was “Captain Trevithick” to his neighbors. The elder Trevithick’s work included serving as mine engineer and assayer, and he would have been familiar with all the technical workings of the mine, from the digging equipment to the pumping engine. The younger Trevithick must have learned well from his father. At fifteen, he was employed by his father at Dolcoath, the most lucrative copper mine of the region. By age 21, having grown into something of a giant himself—standing a burly six feet two, his pastimes were said to include hurling sledgehammers over buildings—the miners of Cornwall already consulted him for his expertise on steam engines.[8] Linnell, John; Richard Trevithick (1771-1833); Science Museum, London ; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/richard-trevithick-17711833-179865 " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fvh4aGvmBxWfkJ8nuFse_zi81ic9" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fup2esWZsI8X2tlxXLO8fiQzWI8j?w=739" loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fup2esWZsI8X2tlxXLO8fiQzWI8j?w=831" alt="" class="wp-image-14451" width="566" height="696" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FnhVecf3Lm75yyCxkoj00B9ZFNOG 566w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FikdTskwdmnAoksYCE_1j4a5Fl2B 122w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fvh4aGvmBxWfkJ8nuFse_zi81ic9 244w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FgMy22xNugUYyjZ88KOSKWMwaLrv 768w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/Fup2esWZsI8X2tlxXLO8fiQzWI8j 974w" sizes="(max-width: 566px) 100vw, 566px">A portrait of Trevithick painted in 1816, when he was 45. He gestures to the Andes of Peru in the background, where Trevithick intended, at the time, to make his fortune in silver mining. By the 1790s, Boulton and Watt were about as popular in Cornwall as Fulton and Livingston were in the American West, and for the same reason: they were seen as grasping monopolists who kept the miners of Cornwall, who depended on effective pumps for their livelihood, in thrall to the Watt patent. Fifteen years earlier, Watt’s efficient engines had appeared as a lifeline to copper mines suffering under competition from the prodigious Parys Mountain in Anglesey, whose ample ores could be cheaply mined directly from the surface.[9] But as the mines continued to struggle, Boulton and Watt began to take shares in mines in lieu of payment, and set up a headquarters at Cusgarne, right in the copper district, to oversee their investments. One of their most skilled mechanics, William Murdoch, moved to Cornwall and acted as their local agent. To the copper miners, Boulton and Watt began to look like meddlers as well as leeches. By the 1790s, Anglesey ran out of easy-to-reach ore, and the fortunes of the Cornwall copper mines began to look up. With their mutual enemy gone, the grudging partnership between the Cornish miners and Boulton and Watt soured rapidly. The Dolcoath Copper Mine, Camborne, Cornwall, circa 1831. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=300" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=739" loading="lazy" width="902" height="637" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=902" alt="" class="wp-image-14453" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96 902w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=150 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=300 300w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FqNKGmmJrqZRNRB6bm49nha_7A96?w=768 768w" sizes="(max-width: 902px) 100vw, 902px">An 1831 engraving of Dolcoath copper mine, in Cornwall. Trevithick, a hot-headed young man, took up the banner of revolution against the Boulton and Watt regime in 1792, fighting a series of legal battles on behalf of the competing engine design of Edward Bull. By 1796 every battle had been lost—Bull and Trevithick’s attempt to defy the Watt patent had failed, and there seemed to be nothing for the Cornwall interests to do but wait for the expiration of its term, in 1800.[10] But Trevithick found another way forward: strong steam. More than any other element, the separate condenser distinguished Watt’s patent engine from its predecessors. By shedding the condenser and operating well above atmospheric pressure instead, Trevithick could avoid claims of infringement. Concerned that releasing uncondensed steam would waste all the power of the engine, he consulted Cornwall’s resident mathematician, Davies Giddy. Giddy reassured him that he would waste a fixed amount of power equal to the weight of the atmosphere, and would gain some compensation in return by saving the power required to work an air pump and lift water into the condenser.[11] As in the U.S., then, the socioeconomic environment pushed steam engine users on the periphery toward high-pressure, though in this case it was the presence of a rival patent rather than an absence of capital resources. Trevithick saw an immediate application for high-pressure steam as a replacement for the horse whim, an animal-powered lift which worked alongside the pumping engine in many Cornish mines, usually in the same vertical shaft, to raise ore and dross from below. A few whims had been installed with Watt engines, but Trevithick’s “puffers” (so called for the visible puff of exhaust steam they released) cost less to build and transport. The compact high-pressure engine also fit much more comfortably in the engine house alongside the pumping engine than a second Watt behemoth would.  An 1806 Trevithick stationary steam engine, minus the flywheel it would have had at the time to maintain a steady motion. Note how the exhaust flue comes out of the middle of the cylindrical boiler, the same return-flue design used by Evans to extract additional heat from the hot gases of the furnace. Trevithick’s engines thus began replacing horse whims in engine houses across Cornwall in the early 1800s.[12] The Watt interests were not happy: much later in life Trevithick claimed that Watt (probably referring in this case to the belligerent James Watt, Jr., the inventor’s son), “said to an eminent scientific character still living that I deserved hanging for bringing into use the high pressure,” presumably because of the danger of explosion.[13] One of Trevithick’s boilers, installed to drain the foundation for a corn mill in Greenwich, did in fact explode in 1803 when left unattended, and the Watts did not miss the opportunity to get in their “I told you sos” in the press.[14] In future engines Trevithick would include two safety valves, plus a plug soldered with lead as a final safety measure: if the water level fell too low, the heat would melt the solder and blow out the plug, relieving excess pressure. But Trevithick’s interest had by this time already wandered from staid industrial applications to the more romantic dream of a steam carriage. Steam Carriage As we have seen already several times in this story, many inventors and philosophers had dreamed the same dream, dating back well over a century. To realize how readily available the idea of a steam carriage was, we must remember that steam power’s job, in a sense, had always been to replace either horse- or water-power, and that carriages were the most ubiquitous piece of horse-powered machinery around in early modern Europe. The first person we know of to successfully build a steam carriage (if we construe success loosely), was a French army officer named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. More specifically, he built a steam fardier, a cart for pulling cannon. It was a curious looking tricycle with the boiler hanging off the front like an elephantine proboscis. Cugnot carried out some trial runs of his vehicle in 1769, but with no way to refill the boiler while in use, it had to stop every fifteen minutes to let the boiler cool, refill it, and work up steam once more. This was a curiosity without real practical value.[15] Cugnot’s Fardier à Vapeur, preserved at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Trevithick probably never heard of Cugnot, but he certainly knew William Murdoch, Watt’s representative in Cornwall. Murdoch began experimenting with high-pressure steam carriages in the 1780s, and built a three-wheeled carriage that (like Cugnot’s cart) survives today in a museum. Unlike Cugnot’s, vehicle however, Murdoch’s surviving machine is a model, no more than a foot tall. Lacking the backing of his employers, who disliked strong steam and found the carriage concept unpromising if not ridiculous, Murdoch’s tinkerings did not even get as far as Cugnot’s. There is no evidence that he ever built a full-sized carriage. [16] Editing Undertaken: Levels, Unsharp Mask " data-medium-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhB8HkLDtOTEC4mIMPtlRbD1ZWQw" data-large-file="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhK0Cs7bJUzfypvzPNEZgik6nL4T?w=739" loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhK0Cs7bJUzfypvzPNEZgik6nL4T?w=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-14457" width="561" height="421" srcset="https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FpqH97sUpkaqcDXUxuJIXFhnlUoO 561w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FjVNxoFYXseTtLwNZJAeiqhVHwOf 150w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhB8HkLDtOTEC4mIMPtlRbD1ZWQw 300w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FtfsjNccReQS7wrfGvu9EyUGjYcr 768w, https://cdn.accountdigital.net/FhK0Cs7bJUzfypvzPNEZgik6nL4T 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 561px) 100vw, 561px">Murdoch’s model steam carriage. It’s unclear why Trevithick decided to build a steam-powered vehicle—he may have been trying to develop a portable engine that could be moved between work sites under its own power. It is possible that Trevithick got the idea for a steam carriage from Murdoch, but, as we have seen, the idea was commonplace. In the execution of that idea, Trevithick went far beyond his predecessor. He began work on his steam carriage in late 1800, with the help of his cousin Andrew Vivian and several other local craftsmen. He already had in hand his high-pressure engine design, with a very favorable power-to-weight ratio compared to a Watt engine. A small and light engine was advantageous in a steamboat, but it was crucial in a land vehicle that had to rest on wheels and fit on narrow roads. He used the same return-flue boiler design as Oliver Evans had; given the distance and timing, they almost certainly arrived at this idea independently. Many wise men of the time doubted that a self-driving wheel was even possible, arguing that it would simply spin in place without an animal with traction to pull it. Trevithick therefore felt it necessary to first disprove this theory (in an experiment probably devised by Giddy) by sitting in a chaise with his compatriots, and moving the vehicle by turning the wheels with their hands.[17] In December 1801 they went for their first steam-powered ride. What exactly the first carriage looked like is unknown, but it was likely a simple wheeled platform with engine and boiler mounted atop it and a crude lever for steering. Years later one “old Stephen Williams” (not so old at the time) would recall: I was a cooper by trade, and when Captain Dick [Trevithick] was making his first-steam carriage I used to go every day into John Tyack’s blacksmiths’ shop at the Weith, close by here, where they were putting it together. …In the year of 1801, upon Christmas-eve, coming on evening, Captain Dick got up steam, out in the high road… we jumped up as many as could; may be seven or eight of us. ‘Twas a stiffish hill going from the Weith up to Cambourne Beacon, but she went off like a little bird.[18] Within days, this first carriage quite literally crashed and burned (though the burning was apparently caused by leaving the carriage unattended with the firebox lit, not by the crash itself).[19] Nonetheless, Trevithick formed a partnership with his cousin Vivian to develop both the high-pressure engine and its use in carriages, and they went to London to seek a patent and additional backers and advisers, including such scientific luminaries as Humphrey Davy and Count Rumford. They had a second carriage built, this one designed as a true passenger vehicle with a compartment to accommodate eight. Giddy nicknamed it “Trevithick’s Dragon.” It worked better than the first attempt, running a good eight miles-per-hour on level ground, but the ride was rough. For some decades, steel spring suspensions had been standard on carriages, but the direct geared linkage between the drive wheels and the engine on Trevithick’s carriage did not allow for them to move independently.[20] The steering mechanism also worked poorly. In one early trial Trevithick tore the rail from a garden wall, and Vivian’s relative Captain Joseph Vivian (actually a sea captain) reported after a drive that he “thought he was more likely to suffer shipwreck on the steam-carriage than on board his vessel…”[21] It offered no obvious advantages over a horse carriage to offset the loss of comfort and control, not to mention the risk of fire and explosion. The Dragon attracted some curious onlookers, but no investors. Steam Railway If steam-powered vehicles on water found success first in the U.S. because alternative modes of inland transportation were lacking, steam-powered vehicles on land found success first in Britain because the transportation medium to support them already existed. The railways offered the perfect solution for the problems of Trevithick’s steam carriage: a road without cobbles or ruts to jounce on, a road that steered the carriage for you, and a road with no passengers to annoy or endanger. But Trevithick was not positioned to see it, because Cornwall did not have railways of any kind (its first, the Portreath Tramroad was not constructed until 1812). It would take a new connection to link the engine born out of the struggle with Watt over the mines of Cornwall to the rails created to solve the problems of northern coalfields. On business in Bristol in 1803, Trevithick made that connection, when he met a Welsh ironmaster named Samuel Homfray, who provided him with fresh capital in exchange for a share in his patent, and solicited his aid in building steam engines for his ironworks, called Penydarren. It also happened that Homfray also had part ownership of a railway, and the opportunity thus arose to marry high-pressure steam to rails. For Homfray this was also an opportunity to show up a rival. He and several other ironmasters had invested in a canal to carry their wares down to the port at Cardiff, but the controlling partner, Richard Crawshay, demanded exclusive privileges over the waterway. Homfray and several of the other partners exploited a loophole to bypass Crawshay. At the time, any public thoroughfare (on land or water) required an act of Parliament to approve its construction. The act approving the Cardiff canal also allowed for the construction of railways within four miles of the canal. The intent of this was to allow for feeder lines. Rails, at the time, were a strictly secondary transportation system. They provided “last-mile” service from mining centers to a navigable waterway. A boom in canal building that began in the later eighteenth century extended and interconnect those waterways, which offered far lower transportation costs than any form of land transportation. If a horse could pull several times the weight on a railway that it could on an ordinary road, it could pull several times more again when hitched to a canal barge.[22] (The plummeting transportation costs brought about by the ability to float cargo to the coast from nearly any town in England by horse-drawn barge account for the lack of British interest in riverine steamboats.) So the goal was almost always to get goods to water as quickly as possible. The trick that Homfray and his allies pulled was to build a railway as a primarytransportation link in its own right, paralleling the canal for over nine miles, rather than connecting directly to it, and thereby neutering Crawshay’s privileges.[23] It was on this railway that Homfray (or perhaps Trevithick, which partner initiated the idea is unknown) proposed to replace horse power with steam power. Crawshay found the concept laughable. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that the smooth wheels would find no purchase on smooth rails, and would simply spin in place. The ironmasters placed a not-so-friendly wager of 500 guineas over whether Trevithick could build a locomotive to haul ten tons of iron the length of the railway. On February 21st, 1804, Crawshay lost. As Trevithick reported to Giddy: Yesterday we proceeded on our journey with the engine; we carry’d ten tons of Iron, five waggons, and 70 Men riding on them the whole of the journey. Its above 9 miles which we perform’d in 4 hours & 5 Mints, but we had to cut down som trees and remove some Large rocks out of road. The engine, while working, went nearly 5 miles pr hour; …We shall continue to work on the road, and shall take forty tons the next journey. The publick untill now call’d mee a schemeing fellow but now their tone is much alter’d.[24] We should not picture the Penydarren engine in the mind’s eye as the iconic, fully-developed steam locomotive of the mid-19th century. The railbed itself looked very different than what we might imagine: the cast-iron rails were outward-facing Ls, whose vertical stroke kept the wheels from leaving the track. Nails driven into two parallel rows of stone blocks held the rails in place. This arrangement avoided having perpendicular rail ties (or sleepers, as the British call them) that could trip up the horses, who walked between the rails as they pulled their cargo. Trevithick’s locomotive resembled a stationary engine jury-rigged to a wheeled platform. A crosshead and large gears carried power from the cylinder down to the left-hand wheels (only, the right side received no power), and a flywheel kept the vehicle from lurching each time the piston reached the dead center position. Trevithick’s goal was to show off the versatility of high-pressure steam, not to launch a railroad revolution. A replica showing what the Penydarren locomotive may have looked like. Note the fixed gearing system for delivering power to the two wheels in the foreground, the flywheel in the background, and the L-shaped rails. Notice also how much it resembles Trevithick’s stationary steam engine, with additional mechanisms to transmit power to the wheels. The Penydarren locomotive performed several more trial runs; on at least one, the rails cracked under the engine’s weight: a portent of a major technical obstacle yet to be overcome before steam railways could find lasting success. Trevithick then seems to have removed the engine and put it to work running a hammer in the ironworks; what became of the rest of the vehicle is unknown.[25] Many other endeavors captured Trevithick’s attention in the following years; among them stationary engines at Penydarren and elsewhere, steam dredging experiments, and a scheme to use a steam tug to drag a fireship into the midst of Napoleon’s putative invasion fleet at Bolougne (as we have seen, Robert Fulton was at this time trying to sell the British government on his “torpedoes” to serve the same purpose). In 1808, he made once last stab at steam locomotion, a demonstration vehicle called the Catch-me-who-can that ran over a temporary circular track in London. Again, rail breakage proved a problem. Trevithick hoped to earn some money from paying riders and to attract the interest of investors, but he failed on both accounts.[26] The reasons for the lack of interest are clear. Trevithick’s locomotives were neither much faster nor obviously cheaper than a team of horses, and they came with a host of new, unsolved technical problems. Twenty more years would elapse before rails would begin to seriously challenge canals as major transport arteries for Britain, not mere peripheral capillaries. To make that happen would require improvements in locomotives, better rails, and a new way of thinking about the comparative economics of transportation. Trevithick himself had twenty-five more years of restless, peripatetic life ahead of him, much of it spent on fruitless mining ventures in South and Central America. In an irresistible historical coincidence, in 1827, at the end of a financially ruinous trip to Costa Rica, he crossed paths with another English engineer named Robert Stephenson. Stephenson gave the downtrodden older man fifty pounds to help him get home. After a spate of mostly failed or abortive projects, Trevithick died in 1833. The one item of real wealth remaining to him, a gold watch brought back from South America, went to defray his funeral expenses.[27] Young Stephenson, however, returned to much brighter prospects in England. He and his father would soon redeem the promise hinted at by the trials at Penydarren.

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Internet Ascendant, Part 2: Going Private and Going Public

In the summer of 1986, Senator Al Gore, Jr., of Tennessee introduced an amendment to the Congressional Act that authorized the  budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF). He called for the federal government to study the possibilities for “communications networks for supercomputers at universities and Federal research facilities.” To explain the purpose of this legislation, Gore called on a striking analogy: One promising technology is the development of fiber optic systems for voice and data transmission. Eventually we will see a system of fiber optic systems being installed nationwide. America’s highways transport people and materials across the country. Federal freeways connect with state highways which connect in turn with county roads and city streets. To transport data and ideas, we will need a telecommunications highway connecting users coast to coast, state to state, city to city. The study required in this amendment will identify the problems and opportunities the nation will face in establishing that highway.1In the following years, Gore and his allies would call for the creation of an “information superhighway”, or, more formally, a national information infrastructure (NII). As he intended, Gore’s analogy to the federal highway system summons to mind a central exchange that would bind together various local and regional networks, letting all American citizens communicate with one another. However, the analogy also misleads – Gore did not propose the creation of a federally-funded and maintained data network. He envisioned that the information superhighway, unlike its concrete and asphalt namesake, would come into being through the action of market forces, within a regulatory framework that would ensure competition, guarantee open, equal access to any service provider (what would later be known as “net neutrality”), and provide subsidies or other mechanisms to ensure universal service to the least fortunate members of society, preventing the emergence of a gap between the information rich and information poor.2Over the following decade, Congress slowly developed a policy response to the growing importance of computer networks to the American research community, to education, and eventually to society as a whole. Congress’ slow march towards an NII policy, however, could not keep up with the rapidly growing NSFNET, overseen by the neighboring bureaucracy of the executive branch. Despite its reputation for sclerosis, bureaucracy was created exactly because of its capacity, unlike a legislature, to respond to events immediately, without deliberation. And so it happened that, between 1988 and 1993, the NSF crafted the policies that would determine how the Internet became private, and thus went public. It had to deal every year with novel demands and expectations from NSFNET’s users and peer networks. In response, it made decisions on the fly, decisions which rapidly outpaced Congressional plans for guiding the development of an information superhighway. These decisions rested largely in the hands of a single man – Stephen Wolff.Acceptable UseWolff earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Princeton in 1961 (where he would have been a rough contemporary of Bob Kahn), and began what might have been a comfortable academic career, with a post-doctoral stint at Imperial College, followed by several years teaching at Johns Hopkins. But then he shifted gears, and took a position  at the Ballistics Research lab in Aberdeen, Maryland. He stayed there for most of the 1970s and early 1980s, researching communications and computing systems for the U.S. Army. He introduced Unix into the lab’s offices, and managed Aberdeen’s connection to the ARPANET.3In 1986, the NSF recruited him to manage the NSF’s supercomputing backbone – he was a natural fit, given his experience connecting Army supercomputers to ARPANET. He became the principal architect of NSFNET’s evolution from that point until his departure in 1994, when he entered the private sector as a manager for Cisco Systems. The original intended function of the net that Wolff was hired to manage had been to connect researchers across the U.S. to NSF-funded supercomputing centers. As we saw last time, however, once Wolff and the other network managers saw how much demand the initial backbone had engendered, they quickly developed a new vision of NSFNET, as a communications grid for the entire American research and post-secondary education community.However, Wolff did not want the government to be in the business of supplying network services on a permanent basis. In his view, the NSF’s role was to prime the pump, creating the initial demand needed to get a commercial networking services sector off the ground. Once that happened, Wolff felt it would be improper for a government entity to be in competition with viable for-profit businesses. So he intended to get NSF out of the way by privatizing the network, handing over control of the backbone to unsubsidized private entities and letting the market take over.This was very much in the spirit of the times. Across the Western world, and across most of the political spectrum, government leaders of the 1980s touted privatization and deregulation as the best means to unleash economic growth and innovation after the relative stagnation of the 1970s. As one example among many, around the same time that NSFNET was getting off the ground, the FCC knocked down several decades-old constraints on corporations involved in broadcasting. In 1985, it removed the restriction on owning print and broadcast media in the same locality, and two year later it nullified the fairness doctrine, which had required broadcasters to present multiple views on public-policy debates. From his post at NSF, Wolff had several levers at hand for accomplishing his goals. The first lay in the interpretation and enforcement of the network’s acceptable use policy (AUP). In accordance with NSF’s mission, the initial policy for the NSFNET backbone, in effect until June 1990, required all uses of the network to be in support of “scientific research and other scholarly activities.” This is quite restrictive indeed, and would seem to eliminate any possibility of commercial use of the network. But Wolff chose to interpret the policy liberally. Regularly mailing list postings about new product releases from a corporation that sold data processing software – was that not in support of scientific research? What about the decision to allow MCI’s email system to connect to the backbone, at the urging of Vint Cerf, who had left government employ to oversee the development of MCI Mail. Wolff rationalized this – and other later interconnections to commercial email systems such as CompuServe’s – as in support of research by making it possible for researchers to communicate digitally with a wider range of people that they might need to contact in the pursuit of their work. A stretch, perhaps. But Wolff saw that allowing some commercial traffic on the same infrastructure that was used for public NSF traffic would encourage the private investment needed to support academic and educational use on a permanent basis. Wolff’s strategy of opening the door of NSFNET as far as possible to commercial entities got an assist from Congress in 1992, when Congressman Rick Boucher, who helped oversee NSF as chair of the Science Subcommittee, sponsored an amendment to the NSF charter which authorized any additional uses of NSFNET that would “tend to increase the overall capabilities of the networks to support such research and education activities.” This was an ex post facto validation of Wolff’s approach to commercial traffic, allowing virtually any activity as long as it produced profits that encouraged more private investment into NSFNET and its peer networks.  Dual-Use NetworksWolff also fostered the commercial development of networking by supporting the regional networks’ reuse of their networking hardware for commercial traffic. As you may recall, the NSF backbone linked together a variety of not-for-profit regional nets, from NYSERNet in New York to Sesquinet in Texas to BARRNet in northern California. NSF did not directly fund the regional networks, but it did subsidize them indirectly, via the money it provided to labs and universities to offset the costs of their connection to their neighborhood regional net. Several of the regional nets then used this same subsidized infrastructure to spin off a for-profit commercial enterprise, selling network access to the public over the very same wires used for the research and education purposes sponsored by NSF. Wolff encouraged them to do so, seeing this as yet another way to accelerate the transition of the nation’s research and education infrastructure to private control. This, too, accorded neatly with the political spirit of the 1980s, which encouraged private enterprise to profit from public largesse, in the expectation that the public would benefit indirectly through economic growth. One can see parallels with the dual-use regional networks in the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which defaulted ownership of patents derived from government-funded research to the organization performing the work, not to the government that paid for it. The most prominent example of dual-use in action was PSINet, a for-profit company initially founded as Performance Systems International in 1988. William Schrader and Martin Schoffstall, the co-founder of NYSERNet and one of vice presidents’, respectively, created the company. Schofstall, a former BBN engineer and co-author of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) for managing the devices on an IP network, was the key technical leader. Schrader, an ambitious Cornell biology major and MBA who had helped his alma mater set up its supercomputing center and get it connected to NSFNET, provided the business drive. He firmly believed that NYSERNet should be selling service to businesses, not just educational institutions. When the rest of the board disagreed, he quit to found his own company, first contracting with NYSERNet for service, and later raising enough money to acquire its assets. PSINet thus became one of the earliest commercial internet service providers, while continuing to provide non-profit service to colleges and universities seeking access to the NSFNET backbone.4Wolff’s final source of leverage for encouraging a commercial Internet lay in his role as manager of the contracts with the Merit-IBM-MCI consortium that operated the backbone. The initial impetus for change in this dimension came not from Wolff, however, but from the backbone operators themselves.  A For-Profit BackboneMCI and its peers in the telecommunications industry had a strong incentive to find or create more demand for computer data communications. They had spent the 1980s upgrading their long-line networks from coaxial cable and microwave – already much higher capacity than the old copper lines – to fiber optic cables. These cables, which transmitted laser light through glass, had tremendous capacity, limited mainly by the technology in the transmitters and receivers on either end, rather than the cable itself. And that capacity was far from saturated. By the early 1990s, many companies had deployed OC-48 transmission equipment with 2.5 Gbps of capacity, an almost unimaginable figure a decade earlier. An explosion in data traffic would therefore bring in new revenue at very little marginal cost – almost pure profit.5The desire to gain expertise in the coming market in data communications helps explains why MCI was willing to sign on to the NSFNET bid proposed by Merit, which massively undercut the competing bids (at $14 million for five years, versus the $40 and $25 millions proposed by their competitors6), and surely implied a short-term financial loss for MCI and IBM. But by 1989, they hoped to start turning a profit from their investment. The existing backbone was approaching the saturation point, with 500 million packets a month, a 500% year-over-year increase.7 So, when NSF asked Merit to upgrade the backbone from 1.5 Mbps T1 lines to 45Mbps T3, they took the opportunity to propose to Wolff a new contractual arrangement.T3 was a new frontier in networking – no prior experience or equipment existed for digital networks of this bandwidth, and so the companies argued that more private investment would be needed, requiring a restructuring that would allow IBM and Merit to share the new infrastructure with for-profit commercial traffic – a dual-use backbone. To achieve this, the consortium would from a new non-profit corporation, Advanced Network & Services, Inc. (ANS), which would supply T3 networking services to NSF. A subsidiary called ANS CO+RE systems would sell the same services at a profit to any clients willing to pay. Wolff agreed to this, seeing it as just another step in the transition of the network towards commercial control. Moreover, he feared that continuing to block commercial exploitation of the backbone would lead to a bifurcation of the network, with suppliers like ANS doing an end-run around NSFNET to create their own, separate, commercial Internet. Up to that point, Wolff’s plan for gradually getting NSF out of the way had no specific target date or planned milestones. A workshop on the topic held at Harvard in March 1990, in which Wolff and many other early Internet leaders participated, considered a variety of options without laying out any concrete plans.8 It was ANS’ stratagem that triggered the cascade of events that led directly to the full privatization and commercialization of NSFNET.It began with a backlash. Despite Wolff’s good intentions, IBM and MCI’s ANS maneuver created a great deal of disgruntlement in the networking community. It became a problem exactly because of the for-profit networks attached to the backbone that Wolff had promoted. So far they had gotten along reasonably with one another, because they all operated as peers on the same terms. But with ANS, a for-profit company held a de-facto monopoly on the backbone at the center of the Internet.9 Moreover, despite Wolff’s efforts to interpret the AUP loosely, ANS chose to interpret it strictly, and refused to interconnect the non-profit portion of the backbone (for NSF traffic) with any of their for-profit networks like PSI, since that would require a direct mixing of commercial and non-commercial traffic. When this created an uproar, they backpedaled, and came up with a new policy, allowing interconnection for a fee based on traffic volume.PSINet would have none of this. In the summer of 1991, they banded together with two other for-profit Internet service providers – UUNET, which had begun by selling commercial access to Usenet before adding Internet service; and the California Education and Research Federation Network, or CERFNet, operated by General Atomics – to form their own exchange, bypassing the ANS backbone. The Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) consisted at first of just a single routing center in Washington D.C. which could transfer traffic among the three networks. They agreed to peer at no charge, regardless of the relative traffic volume, with each network paying the same fee to CIX to operate the router. New routers in Chicago and Silicon Valley soon followed, and other networks looking to avoid ANS’ fees also joined on.DivestitureRick Boucher, the Congressman whom we met above as a supporter of NSF commercialization, nonetheless requested an investigation of the propriety of Wolff’s actions in the ANS affair by the Office of the Inspector General. It found NSF’s actions precipitous, but not malicious or corrupt. Nevertheless, Wolff saw that the time had come to divest control of the backbone. With ANS + CORE and CIX privatization and commercialization had begun in earnest, but in a way that risked splitting the unitary Internet into multiple disconnected fragments, as CIX and ANS refused to connect with one another. NSF therefore drafted a plan for a new, privatized network architecture in the summer of 1992, released it for public comment, and finalized it in May of 1993. NSFNET would shut down in the spring of 1995, and its assets would revert to IBM and MCI. The regional networks could continue to operate, with financial support from the NSF gradually phasing out over a four year period, but would have to contract with a private ISP for internet access.But in a world of many competitive internet access providers, what would replace the backbone? What mechanism would link these opposed private interests into a cohesive whole? Wolff’s answer was inspired by the exchanges already built by cooperatives like CIX – NSF would contract out the creation of four Network Access Points (NAPs), routing sites where various vendors could exchange traffic. Having four separate contracts would avoid repeating the ANS controversy, by preventing a monopoly on the points of exchange. One NAP would reside at the pre-existing, and cheekily named, Metropolitan Area Ethernet East (MAE-East) in Vienna, Virginia, operated by Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS). MAE-West, operated by Pacific Bell, was established in San Jose, California; Sprint operated another NAP in Pennsauken, New Jersey, and Ameritech one in Chicago. The transition went smoothly10, and NSF decommissioned the backbone right on schedule, on April 30, 1995.11The Break-upThough Gore and others often invoked the “information superhighway” as a metaphor for digital networks, there was never serious consideration in Congress of using the federal highway system as a direct policy model. The federal government paid for the building and maintenance of interstate highways in order to provide a robust transportation network for the entire country. But in an era when both major parties took deregulation and privatization for granted as good policy, a state-backed system of networks and information services on the French model of Transpac and Minitel was not up for consideration.12Instead, the most attractive policy model for Congress as it planned for the future of telecommunication was the long-distance market created by the break-up of the Bell System between 1982 and 1984. In 1974, the Justice Department filed suit against AT&T, its first major suit against the organization since the 1950s, alleging that it had engaged in anti-competitive behavior in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Specifically, they accused the company of using its market power to exclude various innovative new businesses from the market – mobile radio operators, data networks, satellite carriers, makers of specialized terminal equipment, and more. The suit thus clearly drew much of its impetus from the ongoing disputes since the early 1960s (described in an earlier installment), between AT&T and the likes of MCI and Carterfone.When it became clear that the Justice Department meant business, and intended to break the power of AT&T, the company at first sought redress from Congress. John de Butts, chairman and CEO since 1972, attempted to push a “Bell bill” – formally the Consumer Communications Reform Act – through Congress. It would have enshrined into law AT&T’s argument that the benefits of a single, universal telephone network far outweighed any risk of abusive monopoly, risks which in any case the FCC could already effectively check. But the proposal received stiff opposition in the House Subcommittee on Communications, and never reached a vote on the floor of either Congressional chamber. In a change of tactics, in 1979 the board replaced the combative de Butts – who had once declared openly to an audience of state telecommunications regulators the heresy that he opposed competition and espoused monopoly – with the more conciliatory Charles Brown. But it was too late by then to stop the momentum of the antitrust case, and it became increasingly clear to the company’s leadership that they would not prevail. In January 1982, therefore, Brown agreed to a consent decree that would have the presiding judge in the case, Harold Greene, oversee the break-up of the Bell System into its constituent parts.The various Bell companies that brought copper to the customer’s premise, which generally operated by state (New Jersey Bell, Indiana Bell, and so forth) were carved up into seven blocks called Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs). Working clockwise around the country, they were NYNEX in the northeast, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, Pacific Telesis, US West, and Ameritech. All of them remained regulated entities with an effective monopoly over local traffic in their region, but were forbidden from entering other telecom markets. AT&T itself retained the “long lines” division for long-distance traffic. Unlike local phone service, however, the settlement opened this market to free competition from any entrant willing and able to pay the interconnection fees to transfer calls in and out of the RBOCs. A residential customer in Indiana would always have Ameritech as their local telephone company, but could sign up for long-distance service with anyone.However, splitting apart the local and long-distance markets meant forgoing the subsidies that AT&T had long routed to rural telephone subscribers, under-charging them by over-charging wealthy long-distance users. A sudden spike in rural telephone prices across the nation was not politically tenable, so the deal preserved these transfers via a new organization, the non-profit National Exchange Carrier Association, which collected fees from the long-distance companies and distributed them to the RBOCS.   The new structure worked. Two major competitors entered the market in the 1980s, MCI and Sprint, and cut deeply into AT&T’s market share. Long-distance prices fell rapidly. Though it is arguable how much of this was due to competition per se, as opposed to the advent of ultra-high-bandwidth fiber optic networks, the arrangement was generally seen as a great success for de-regulation and a clear argument for the power of market forces to modernize formerly hidebound industries. This market structure, created ad hoc by court fiat but evidently highly successful, provided the template from which Congress drew in the mid-1990s to finally resolve the question of what telecom policy for the Internet era would look like. Second Time Isn’t The CharmPrior to the main event, there was one brief preliminary. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 was important tactically, but not strategically. It advanced no new major policy initiatives. Its primary significance lay in providing additional funding and Congressional backing for what Wolff and the NSF already were doing and intended to keep doing – providing networking services for the research community, subsidizing academic institutions’ connections to NSFNET, and continuing to upgrade the backbone infrastructure.  Then came the accession of the 104th Congress in January 1995. Republicans took control of both the Senate and the House for the first time in forty years, and they came with an agenda to fight crime, cut taxes, shrink and reform government, and uphold moral righteousness. Gore and his allies had long touted universal access as a key component of the National Information Infrastructure, but with this shift in power the prospects for a strong universal service component to telecommunications reform diminished from minimal to none. Instead, the main legislative course would consist of regulatory changes to foster competition in telecommunications and Internet access, with a serving of bowdlerization on the side. The market conditions looked promising. Circa 1992, the major players in the telecommunications industry were numerous. In the traditional telephone industry there were the seven RBOCs, GTE, and three large long distance companies – AT&T, MCI, and Sprint – along with many smaller ones. The new up-and-comers included Internet service providers, such as UUNET, and PSINET as well as the IBM/MCI backbone spin-off, ANS; and other companies trying to build out their local fiber networks, such as Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS). BBN, the contractor behind ARPANET, had begun to build its own small Internet empire, snapping up some of the regional networks that orbited around NSFNET – Nearnet in New England, BARRNet in the Bay area, and SURANet in the southeast of the U.S. To preserve and expand this competitive landscape would be the primary goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the only major rewrite of communications policy since the Communications Act of 1934. It intended to reshape telecommunications law for the digital age. The regulatory regime established by the original act siloed industries by their physical transmission medium – telephony, broadcast radio and television, cable TV; in each in its own box, with its own rules, and generally forbidden to meddle in each other’s business. As we have seen, sometimes regulators even created silos within silos, segregating the long-distance and local telephone markets. This made less and less sense as media of all types were reduced to fungible digital bits, which could be commingled on the same optical fiber, satellite transmission, or ethernet cable. The intent of the 1996 Act, shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, was to tear down these barriers, these “Berlin Walls of regulation”, as Gore’s own summary of the act put it.13 A complete itemization of the regulatory changes in this doorstopper of a bill is not possible here, but a few examples provide a taste of its character. Among other things it:allowed the RBOCs to compete in long-distance telephone markets,lifted restrictions forbidding the same entity from owning both broadcasting and cable services,axed the rules that prevented concentration of radio station ownership.The risk, though, of simply removing all regulation, opening the floodgates and letting any entity participate in any market, was to recreate AT&T on an even larger scale, a monopolistic megacorp that would dominate all forms of communication and stifle all competitors. Most worrisome of all was control over the so-called last mile – from the local switching office to the customer’s home or office. Building an inter-urban network connecting the major cities of the U.S. was expensive but not prohibitive, several companies had done so in recent decades, from Sprint to UUNET. To replicate all the copper or cable to every home in even one urban area, was another matter. Local competition in landline communications had scarcely existed since the early wildcat days of the telephone, when tangled skeins of iron wire criss-crossed urban streets. In the case of the Internet, the concern centered especially on high-speed, direct-to-the-premises data services, later known as broadband. For years, competition had flourished among dial-up Internet access providers, because all the end user required to reach the provider’s computer was access to a dial tone. But this would not be the case by default for newer services that did not use the dial telephone network. The legislative solution to this conundrum was to create the concept of the “CLEC” – competitive local exchange carrier. The RBOCs, now referred to as “ILECs” (incumbent local exchange carriers), would be allowed full, unrestricted access to the long-distance market only once the had unbundled their networks by allowing the CLECs, which would provide their own telecommunications services to homes and businesses, to interconnect with and lease the incumbents’ infrastructure. This would enable competitive ISPs and other new  service providers to continue to get access to the local loop even when dial-up service became obsolete – creating, in effect, a dial tone for broadband. The CLECs, in this model, filled the same role as the long-distance providers in the post-break-up telephone market. Able to freely interconnect at reasonable fees to the existing local phone networks, they would inject competition into a market previously dominated by the problem of natural monopoly. Besides the creation of the CLECS, the other major part of the bill that affected the Internet addressed the Republicans’ moral agenda rather than their economic one. Title V, known as the Communications Decency Act, forbade the transmission of indecent or offensive material – depicting or describing “sexual or excretory activities or organs”, on any part of the Internet accessible to minors. This, in effect, was an extension of the obscenity and indecent rules that governed broadcasting into the world of interactive computing services. How, then, did this sweeping act fare in achieving its goals? In most dimensions it proved a failure. Easiest to dispose with is the Communications Decency Act, which the Supreme Court struck down quickly (in 1997) as a violation of the First Amendment. Several parts of Title V did survive review however, including Section 230, the most important piece of the entire bill for the Internet’s future. It allows websites that host user-created content to exist without the fear of constant lawsuits, and protects the continued existence of everything from giants like Facebook and Twitter to tiny hobby bulletin boards. The fate of the efforts to promote competition within the local loop took longer to play out, but proved no more successful than the controls on obscenity. What about the CLECs, given access to the incumbent cable and telephone infrastructure so that they could compete on price and service offerings? The law required FCC rulemaking to hash out the details of exactly what kind of unbundling had to be offered. The incumbents pressed the courts hard to dispute any such ruling that would open up their lines to competition, repeatedly winning injunctions on the FCC, while threatening that introducing competitors would halt their imminent plans for bringing fiber to the home. Then, with the arrival of the Bush Administration and new chairman Michael Powell in 2001, the FCC became actively hostile to the original goals of the Telecommunications Act. Powell believed that the need for alternative broadband access would be satisfied by intermodal competition among cable, telephone, power communications networks, cellular and wireless networks. No more FCC rules in favor of CLECs would be forthcoming. For a brief time around the year 2000, it was possible to subscribe to third-party high-speed internet access using the infrastructure of your local telephone or cable provider. After that, the most central of the Telecom Act’s  pro-competitive measures became, in effect, a dead letter. The much ballyhooed fiber-to-the home only began to actually reach a significant number of homes after 2010, and the only with reluctance on the part of the incumbents.14 As author Fred Goldstein put it, the incumbents had “gained a fig leaf of competition without accepting serious market share losses.”15During most of the twentieth century, networked industries in the U.S. had sprouted in a burst of entrepreneurial energy and then been fitted into the matrix of a regulatory framework as they grew large and important enough to affect the public interest. Broadcasting and cable television had followed this pattern. So had trucking and the airlines. But with the CLECs all but dead by the early 2000s, the Communications Decency Act revoked, and other attempts to control the Internet such as the Clipper chip16 stymied, the Internet would follow an opposite course. Having come to life under the guiding hand of the state, it would now be allowed to develop in an almost entirely laissez-faire fashion. The NAP framework established by the NSF at the hand-off of the backbone would be the last major government intervention in the structure of the Internet. This was true at both the transport layer – the networks such as Verizon and AT&T that transported raw data, and the applications layer – software services from portals like Yahoo! to search engines like Google to online stores like Amazon.  In our last chapter, we will look at the consequences of this fact, briefly sketching the evolution of the Internet in the U.S. from the mid-1990s onward. [Previous] [Next]Quoted in Richard Wiggins, “Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet” 2000.“Remarks by Vice President Al Gore at National Press Club“, December 21, 1993.Biographical details on Wolff’s life prior to NSF are scarce – I have recorded all of them that I could find here. Notably I have not been able to find even his date and place of birth.Schrader and PSINet rode high on the Internet bubble in the late 1990s, acquiring other businesses aggressively, and, most extravagantly, purchasing the naming rights to the football stadium of the NFL’s newest expansion team, the Baltimore Ravens. Schrader tempted fate with a 1997 article entitled “Why the Internet Crash Will Never Happen.” Unfortunately for him, it did happen, bringing about his ouster from the company in 2001 and PSINet’s bankruptcy the following year.To get a sense of how fast the cost of bandwidth was declining – in the mid-1980s, leasing a T1 line from New York to L.A. would cost $60,000 per month. Twenty years later, a OC-3 circuit with 100 times the capacity cost only $5,000, more than a thousand-fold reduction in price per capacity. See Fred R. Goldstein, The Great Telecom Meltdown, 95-96. Goldstein states that the 1.55 mpbs T1/DS1 line has 1/84th the capacity of OC-3, rather than 1/100th, a discrepancy I can’t account for. But this has little effect on the overall math.Office of Inspector General, “Review of NSFNET,” March 23, 1993.Fraser, “NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking, Final Report”, 27.Brian Kahin, “RFC 1192: Commercialization of the Internet Summary Report,” November 1990.John Markoff, “Data Network Raises Monopoly Fear,” New York Times, December 19, 1991.Though many other technical details had to be sorted out, see  Susan R. Harris and Elise Gerich, “Retiring the NSFNET Backbone Service: Chronicling the End of an Era,” ConneXions, April 1996.The most problematic part of privatization proved to have nothing to do with the hardware infrastructure of the network, but instead with handing over control over the domain name system (DNS). For most of its history, its management had depended on the judgment of a single man – Jon Postel. But businesses investing millions in a commercial internet would not stand for such an ad hoc system. So the government handed control of the domain name system to a contractor, Network Solutions. The NSF had no real mechanism for regulatory oversight of DNS (though they might have done better by splitting the control of different top-level domains (TLDs) among different contractors), and Congress failed to step in to create any kind of regulatory regime. Control changed once again in 1998 to the non-profit ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but the management of DNS still remains a thorny problem.The only quasi-exception to this focus on fostering competition was a proposal by Senator Daniel Inouye to reserve 20% of Internet traffic for public use: Steve Behrens, “Inouye Bill Would Reserve Capacity on Infohighway,” Current, June 20, 1994. Unsurprisingly, it went nowhere. Al Gore, “A Short Summary of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996”.Jon Brodkin, “AT&T kills DSL, leaves tens of millions of homes without fiber Internet,” Ars Technica, October 5, 2020.Goldstein, The Great Telecom Meltdown, 145.The Clipper chip was a proposed hardware backdoor that would give the government the ability to bypass any U.S.-created encryption software.Further ReadingJanet Abatte, Inventing the Internet (1999)Karen D. Fraser “NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking, Final Report” (1996)Shane Greenstein, How the Internet Became Commercial (2015)Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018)Rajiv Shah and Jay P. Kesan, “The Privatization of the Internet’s Backbone Network,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (2007)Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Like Loading...

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The Backbone – Now in Book Form!

This took much longer than I had expected, but it’s finally here. My series “The Backbone” is now available as a book, in both Kindle and paperback formats. You can find it at Amazon.com here. The book improves upon the original posts in many ways: professionally edited text revised to make it flow more smoothly as a book, and to improve correctness and clarity. a new section about the role military fire control systems played in setting the stage for interactive computing culture. an expanded introduction and conclusion, and (for the print edition) an extensive index. improved visual design and layout Share this: Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Like Loading...

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ARPANET, Part 2: The Packet

By the end of 1966, Robert Taylor, had set in motion a project to interlink the many computers funded by ARPA, a project inspired by the “intergalactic network” vision of J.C.R. Licklider. Taylor put the responsibility for executing that project into the capable hands of Larry Roberts. Over the following year, Roberts made several crucial decisions which would reverberate through the technical architecture and culture of ARPANET and its successors, in some cases for decades to come. The first of these in importance, though not in chronology, was to determine the mechanism by which messages would be routed from one computer to another. The Problem If computer A wants to send a message to computer B, how does the message find its way from the one to the other? In theory, one could allow any node in a communications network to communicate with any other node by linking every such pair with its own dedicated cable. To communicate with B, A would simply send a message over the outgoing cable that connects to B. Such a network is termed fully-connected. At any significant size, however, this approach quickly becomes impractical, since the number of connections necessary increases with the square of the number of nodes.1 Instead, some means is needed for routing a message, upon arrival at some intermediate node, on toward its final destination. As of the early 1960s, two basic approaches to this problem were known. The first was store-and-forward message switching. This was the approach used by the telegraph system. When a message arrived at an intermediate location, it was temporarily stored there (typically in the form of paper tape) until it could be re-transmitted out to its destination, or another switching center closer to that destination. Then the telephone appeared, and a new approach was required. A multiple-minute delay for each utterance in a telephone call to be transcribed and routed to its destination would result in an experience rather like trying to converse with someone on Mars. Instead the telephone system used circuit switching. The caller began each telephone call by sending a special message indicating whom they were trying to reach. At first this was done by speaking to a human operator, later by dialing a number which was processed by automatic switching equipment. The operator or equipment established a dedicated electric circuit between caller and callee. In the case of a long-distance call, this might take several hops through intermediate switching centers. Once this circuit was completed, the actual telephone call could begin, and that circuit was held open until one party or the other terminated the call by hanging up. The data links that would be used in ARPANET to connect time-shared computers partook of qualities of both the telegraph and the telephone. On the one hand, data messages came in discrete bursts, like the telegraph, unlike the continuous conversation of a telephone. But these messages could come in a variety of sizes for a variety of purposes, from console commands only a few characters long to large data files being transferred from one computer to another. If the latter suffered some delays in arriving at their destination, no one would particularly mind. But remote interactivity required very fast response times, rather like a telephone call. One important difference between computer data networks and bout the telephone and the telegraph was the error-sensitivity of machine-processed data. A single character in a telegram changed or lost in transmission, or a fragment of a word dropped in a telephone conversation, were matters unlikely to seriously impair human-to-human communication. But if noise on the line flipped a single bit from 0 to 1 in a command to a remote computer, that could entirely change the meaning of that command. Therefore every message would have to be checked for errors, and re-transmitted if any were found. Such repetition would be very costly for large messages, which would be all the more likely to be disrupted by errors, since they took longer to transmit. A solution to these problems was arrived at independently on two different occasions in the 1960s, but the later instance was the first to come to the attention of Larry Roberts and ARPA. The Encounter In the fall of 1967, Roberts arrived in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, hard by the forested peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains, to deliver a paper on ARPA’s networking plans. Almost a year into his stint at the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), many areas of the network design were still hazy, among them the solution to the routing problem. Other than a vague mention of blocks and block size, the only reference to it in Roberts’ paper is in a brief and rather noncommittal passage at the very end: “It has proven necessary to hold a line which is being used intermittently to obtain the one-tenth to one second response time required for interactive work. This is very wasteful of the line and unless faster dial up times become available, message switching and concentration will be very important to network participants.”2 Evidently, Roberts had still not entirely decided whether to abandon the approach he had used in 1965 with Tom Marrill, that is to say, connecting computers over the circuit-switched telephone network via an auto-dialer. Coincidentally, however, someone else was attending the same symposium with a much better thought-out idea of how to solve the problem of routing in data networks. Roger Scantlebury had crossed the Atlantic, from the British National Physical Laboratory (NPL), to present his own paper. Scantlebury took Roberts aside after hearing his talk, and told him all about something called packet-switching. It was a technique his supervisor at the NPL, Donald Davies had developed. Davies’ story and achievements are not generally well-known in the U.S, although in the fall of 1967, Davies’ group at the NPL was at least a year ahead of ARPA in its thinking. Davies, like many early pioneers of electronic computing, had trained as a physicist. He graduated from Imperial College, London in 1943, when he was only 19 years old, and was immediately drafted into the “Tube Alloy” program – Britain’s code name for its nuclear weapons project. There he was responsible for supervising a group of human computers, using mechanical and electric calculators to crank out numerical solutions to problems in nuclear fission.3 After the war, he learned from the mathematician John Womersley about a project he was supervising out at the NPL, to build an electronic computer that would perform the same kinds of calculations at vastly greater speed. The computer, designed by Alan Turing, was called ACE, for “automatic computing engine.” Davies was sold, and got himself hired at NPL as quickly as he could. After contributing to the detailed design and construction of the ACE machine, he remained heavily involved in computing as a research leader at NPL. He happened in 1965 to be in the United States for a professional meeting in that capacity, and used the occasion to visit several major time-sharing sites to see what all the buzz was about. In the British computing community time-sharing in the American sense of sharing a computer interactively among multiple users was unknown. Instead, time-sharing meant splitting a computer’s workload across multiple batch-processing programs (to allow, for example, one program to proceed while another was blocked reading from a tape).4 Davies’ travels took him to Project MAC at MIT, RAND Corporation’s JOSS Project in California, and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System in New Hampshire. On the way home one of his colleagues suggested they hold a seminar on time-sharing to inform the British computing community about the new techniques that they had learned about in the U.S. Davies agreed, and played host to a number of major figures in American computing, among them Fernando Corbató (creator of the Compatible Time-Sharing System at MIT), and Larry Roberts himself. During the seminar (or perhaps immediately after), Davies was struck with the notion that the time-sharing philosophy could be applied to the links between computers, as well as to the computers themselves. Time-sharing computers gave each user a small time slice of the processor before switching to the next, giving each user the illusion of an interactive computer at their fingertips. Likewise, by slicing up each message into standard-sized pieces which Davies called “packets,” a single communications channel could be shared by multiple computers or multiple users of a single computer. And moreover, this would address all the aspects of data communication that were poorly served by telephone- or telegraph-style switching. A user engaged interactively at a terminal, sending short commands and receiving short responses, would not have their single-packet messages blocked behind a large file transfer, since that transfer would be broken into many packets. And any corruption in such large messages would only affect a single packet, which could easily be re-transmitted to complete the message. Davies wrote up his ideas in an unpublished 1966 paper, entitled “Proposal for a Digital Communication Network.” The most advanced telephone networks were then on the verge of computerizing their switching systems, and Davies proposed building packet-switching into that next-generation telephone network, thereby creating a single wide-band communications network that could serve a wide variety of uses, from ordinary telephone calls to remote computer access. By this time Davies had been promoted to Superintendent of NPL, and he formed a data communications group under Scantlebury to flesh out his design and build a working demonstration. Over the year leading up to the Gatlinburg conference, Scantlebury’s team had thus worked out details of how to build a packet-switching network. The failure of a switching node could be dealt with by adaptive routing with multiple paths to the destination, and the failure of an individual packet by re-transmission. Simulation and analysis indicated an optimal packet size of around 1000 bytes – much smaller and the loss of bandwidth from the header metadata required on each packet became too costly, much larger and the response times for interactive users would be impaired too often by large messages. The paper delivered by Scantlebury contained details such as a packet layout format… And an analysis of the effect of packet size on network delay. Meanwhile, Davies’ and Scantlebury’s literature search turned up a series of detailed research papers by an American who had come up with roughly the same idea, several years earlier. Paul Baran, an electrical engineer at RAND Corporation, had not been thinking at all about the needs of time-sharing computer users, however. RAND was a Defense Department-sponsored think tank in Santa Monica, California, created in the aftermath of World War II to carry out long-range planning and analysis of strategic problems in advance of direct military needs.[^sdc] Baran’s goal was to ward off nuclear war by building a highly robust military communications net, which could survive even a major nuclear attack. Such a network would make a Soviet preemptive strike less attractive, since it would be very hard to knock out America’s ability to respond by hitting a few key nerve centers. To that end, Baran proposed a system that would break messages into what he called message blocks, which could be independently routed across a highly-redundant mesh of communications nodes, only to be reassembled at their final destination.  [^sdc]: System Development Corporation (SDC), the primary software contractor to the SAGE system and the site of one of the first networking experiments, as discussed in the last segment, had been spun off from RAND. ARPA had access to Baran’s voluminous RAND reports, but disconnected as they were from the context of interactive computing, their relevance to ARPANET was not obvious. Roberts and Taylor seem never to have taken notice of them. Instead, in one chance encounter, Scantlebury had provided everything to Roberts on a platter: a well-considered switching mechanism, its applicability to the problem of interactive computer networks, the RAND reference material, and even the name “packet.” The NPL’s work also convinced Roberts that higher speeds would be needed than he had contemplated to get good throughput, and so he upgraded his plans to 50 kilobits-per-second lines. For ARPANET, the fundamentals of the routing problem had been solved.5 The Networks That Weren’t As we have seen, not one, but two parties beat ARPA to the punch on figuring out packet-switching, a technique that has proved so effective that its now the basis of effectively all communications. Why, then, was ARPANET the first significant network to actually make use of it? The answer is fundamentally institutional. ARPA had no official mandate to build a communications network, but they did have a large number of pre-existing research sites with computers, a “loose” culture with relatively little oversight of small departments like the IPTO, and piles and piles of money. Taylor’s initial 1966 request for ARPANET came to $1 million, and Roberts continued to spend that much or more in every year from 1969 onward to build and operate the network6. Yet for ARPA as a whole this amount of money was pocket change, and so none of his superiors worried too much about what Roberts was doing with it, so long as it could be vaguely justified as related to national defense.  By contrast, Baran at RAND had no means or authority to actually do anything. His work was pure research and analysis, which might be applied by the military services, if they desired to do so. In 1965, RAND did recommend his system to the Air Force, which agreed that Baran’s design was viable. But the implementation fell within the purview of the Defense Communications Agency, who had no real understanding of digital communications. Baran convinced his superiors at RAND that it would be better to withdraw the proposal than allow a botched implementation to sully the reputation of distributed digital communication. Davies, as Superintendent of the NPL, had rather more executive authority than Baran, but a more limited budget than ARPA, and no pre-existing social and technical network of research computer sites. He was able to build a prototype local packet-switching “network” (it had only one node, but many terminals) at NPL in the late 1960s, with a modest budget of £120,000 pounds over three years.7 ARPANET spent roughly half that on annual operational and maintenance costs alone at each of its many network sites, excluding the initial investment in hardware and software.8 The organization that would have had the power to build a large-scale British packet-switching network was the post office, which operated the country’s telecommunications networks in addition to its traditional postal system. Davies managed to interest a few influential post office officials in his ideas for a unified, national digital network, but to change the  momentum of such a large system was beyond his power. Licklider, through a combination of luck and planning, had found the perfect hothouse for his intergalactic network to blossom in. That is not to say that everything except for the packet-switching concept was a mere matter of money. Execution matters, too. Moreover, several other important design decisions defined the character of ARPANET. The next we will consider is how responsibilities would be divided between the host computers sending and receiving a message, versus the network over which they sent it. [previous] [next] Further Reading Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (1999) Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996) Leonard Kleinrock, “An Early History of the Internet,” IEEE Communications Magazine (August 2010) Arthur Norberg and Julie O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (1996) M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (2001)

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Coda: Steam’s Last Stand

In the year 1900, automobile sales in the United States were divided almost evenly among three types of vehicles: automakers sold about 1,000 cars powered by internal combustion engines, but over 1,600 powered by steam engines, and almost as many by batteries and electric motors. Throughout all of living memory (at least until the very recent rise of electric vehicles), the car and the combustion engine have gone hand in hand, inseparable. Yet, in 1900, this type claimed the smallest share.For historians of technology, this is the most tantalizing fact in the history of the automobile, perhaps the most tantalizing fact in the history of the industrial age. It suggests a multiverse of possibility, a garden of forking, ghostly might-have-beens. It suggests that, perhaps, had this unstable equilibrium tipped in a different direction, many of the negative externalities of the automobile age—smog, the acceleration of global warming, suburban sprawl—might have been averted. It invites the question, why did combustion win? Many books and articles, by both amateur and professional historians, have been written to attempt to answer this question.However, since the electric car, interesting as its history certainly is, has little to tell us about the age of steam, we will consider here a narrower question—why did steam lose? The steam car was an inflection point where steam power, for so long an engine driving technological progress forward, instead yielded the right-of-way to a brash newcomer. Steam began to look like relic of the past, reduced to watching from the shoulder as the future rushed by. For two centuries, steam strode confidently into one new domain after another: mines, factories, steamboats, railroads, steamships, electricity. Why did it falter at the steam car, after such a promising start?The Emergence of the Steam CarThough Germany had given birth to experimental automobiles in the 1880s, the motor car first took off as successful industry in France. Even Benz, the one German maker to see any success in the early 1890s, sold the majority of its cars and motor-tricycles to French buyers. This was in large part due to the excellent quality of French cross-country roads – though mostly gravel rather than asphalt, they were financed by taxes and overseen by civil engineers, and well above the typical European or American standard of the time. These roads…made it easier for businessmen [in France] to envisage a substantial market for cars… They inspired early producers to publicize their cars by intercity demonstrations and races. And they made cars more practical for residents of rural areas and small towns.[1] The first successful motor car business arose in Paris, in the early 1890s. Émile Levassor and René Panhard (both graduates of the École centrale des arts et manufactures, an engineering institute in Paris), met as managers at a machine shop that made woodworking and metal-working tools. They became the leading partners of the firm and took it into auto making after becoming licensors for the Daimler engine.The 1894 Panhard & Levassor Phaeton already shows the beginning of the shift from horseless carriages with an engine under the seats to the modern car layout with a forward engine compartment. [Jörgens.mi / CC BY-SA 3.0]Before making cars themselves, they looked for other buyers for their licensed engines, which led them to a bicycle maker near the Swiss border, Peugeot Frères Aînés, headed by Armand Peugeot. Though bicycles seem very far removed from cars today, they made many contributions to the early growth of the auto industry. The 1880s bicycle boom (stimulated by the invention of the chain-driven “safety” bicycle) seeded expertise in the construction of high-speed road vehicles with ball bearings and tubular metal frames. Many early cars resembled bicycles with an additional wheel or two, and chain drives for powering the rear wheels remained popular throughout the first few decades of automobile development. Cycling groups also became very effective lobbyists for the construction of smooth cross-country roads on which to ride their machines, literally paving the way for the cars to come.[2]Armand Peugeot decided to purchase Daimler engines from Panhard et Levassor and make cars himself. So, already by 1890 there were two French firms making cars with combustion engines. But French designers had not altogether neglected the possibility of running steam vehicles on ordinary roads. In fact, before ever ordering a Daimler engine, Peugeot had worked on a steam tricycle with the man who would prove to be the most persistent partisan of steam cars in France, Léon Serpollet.A steam-powered road vehicle was not, by 1890, a novel idea. It had been proposed countless times, even before the rise of steam locomotives: James Watt himself had first developed an interest in engines, all the way back in the 1750s, after his friend John Robison suggested building a steam carriage. But those who had tried to put the idea into practice had always found the result wanting. Among the problems were the bulk and weight of the engine and all its paraphernalia (boiler, furnace, coal), the difficulty of maintaining a stoked furnace and controlling steam levels (including preventing the risk of boiler explosion), and the complexity of operating the engine. The only kinds of steam road vehicles to find any success, were those that inherently required a lot of weight, bulk, and specialized training to operate—fire engines and steamrollers—and even those only appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century.[3]Consider Serpollet’s immediate predecessor in steam carriage building, the debauched playboy Comte Albert de Dion. He commissioned two toymakers, George Bouton and Charles Trépardoux to make several small steam cars in the 1880s. These coal-fueled machines took thirty minutes or more to build up a head of steam. In 1894 a larger Dion steam tractor finished first in one of the many cross-country auto races that had begun to spring up to help carmakers promote their vehicles. But the judges disqualified Dion’s vehicle on account of its impracticality: requiring both a driver and a stoker for its furnace, it was in a very literal sense a road locomotive. A discouraged Comte de Dion gave up the steam business, but De Dion-Bouton went on to be a successful maker of combustion automobiles and automobile engines.[4]This De Dion-Bouton steam tractor was disqualified from an auto race in 1894 as impractical.Coincidentally enough, Léon Serpollet and his brother Henri were, like Panhard and Levassor, makers of woodworking machines, and like Peugeot, they came from the Swiss borderlands in East-central France. Also like Panhard and Levassor, Léon studied engineering in Paris, in his case at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. But by the time he reached Paris, he and his brother had already concocted the invention that would lead them to the steam car: a “flash” boiler that instantly turned water to steam by passing it through a hot metal tube. This would allow the vehicle to start more quickly (though it still took time to heat the tube before the boiler could be used) and also alleviate safety concerns about a boiler explosion.The most important step to the (relative) success of the Serpollets’ vehicles, however, was when they replaced the traditional coal furnace with a burner for liquid, petroleum-based fuel. This went a long way towards removing the most disqualifying objections to the practicality of steam cars. Kerosene or gasoline weighed less and took up less space than an energy-equivalent amount of coal, and an operator could more easily throttle a liquid-fuel burner (by supplying it with more or less fuel) to control the level of steam.Figure 68: A 1902 Gardner-Serpollet steam car.With early investments from Peugeot and a later infusion of cash from Frank Gardner, an American with a mining fortune, the Serpollets built a business, first selling steam buses in Paris, then turning to small cars. Their steam powerplants generated more power than the combustion vehicles of the time, and Léon promoted them by setting speed records. In 1902, he surpassed seventy-five miles-per-hour along the promenade in Nice. At that time, a Gardner-Serpollet factory in eastern Paris was turning out about 100 cars per year. Though impressive numbers by the standards of the 1890s, already this was becoming small potatoes. In 1901 7,600 cars were produced in France, and 14,000 in 1903; the growing market left Gardner-Serpollet behind as a niche producer. Léon Serpollet made one last pivot back to buses, then died of cancer in 1907 at age forty-eight. The French steam car did not survive him.[5]Unlike in the U.S., steam car sales barely took off in France, and never had parity with the total sales of combustion engine cars from the likes of Panhard et Levassor, Peugeot, and many other makes. There was no moment of balance when it appeared that the future of automotive technology was up for grabs. Why this difference? We’ll have more to say about that later, after we consider the American side of the story.The Acme of the Steam CarAutomobile production in the United States lagged roughly five years behind France; and so it was in 1896 that the first small manufacturers began to appear. Charles and George Duryea (bicycle makers, again), were first off the block. Inspired by an article about Benz’ car, they built their own combustion-engine machine in 1893, and, after winning several races, they began selling vehicles commercially out of Peoria, Illinois in 1896. Several other competitors quickly followed.[6]Steam car manufacturing came slightly later, with the Whitney Motor Wagon Company and the Stanley brothers, both in the Boston area. The Stanleys, twins named Francis and Freelan (or F.E. and F.O.), were successful manufacturers of photographic dry plates, which used a dry emulsion that could be stored indefinitely before use, unlike earlier “wet” plates. They fell into the automobile business by accident, in a similar way to many others—by successfully demonstrating a car they had constructed as a hobby, drawing attention and orders. At an exhibition at the Charles River Park Velodrome in Cambridge, F.E. zipped around the field and up an eighty-foot ramp, demonstrating greater speed and power than any other vehicle present, including an imported combustion-engine De Dion tricycle, which could only climb the ramp halfway.[7]The Stanley brothers mounted in their 1897 steam car.The rights to the Stanley design, through a complex series of business details, ended up in possession of Amzi Barber, the “Asphalt King,” who used tar from Trinidad’s Pitch Lake to pave several square miles worth of roads across the U.S.[8] It was Barber automobiles, sold under the Locomobile brand, that formed the plurality of the 1,600 steam cars sold in the U.S. in 1900: the company sold 5,000 total between 1899 and 1902, at the quite-reasonable price of $600. Locomobiles were quiet and smooth in operation, produced little smoke or odor (though they did breathe great clouds of steam), had the torque required to accelerate rapidly and climb hills, and could smoothly accelerate by simply increasing the speed of the piston, without any shifting of gears. The rattling, smoky, single-cylinder engines of their combustion-powered competitors had none of these qualities.[9]Why then, did the steam car market begin to collapse after 1902? Twenty-seven makes of steam car first appeared in the U.S. in 1899 or 1900, mostly concentrated (like the Locomobile) in the Northeast—New York, Pennsylvania, and (especially) Massachusetts. Of those, only twelve continued making steam cars beyond 1902, and only one—the Lane Motor Vehicle Company of Poughkeepsie, New York—lasted beyond 1905. By that year, the Madison Square Garden car show had 219 combustion models on display, as compared to only twenty electric and nine steam.[10]Barber, the Asphalt King, was interested in cars, regardless of what made them go. As the market shifted to combustion, so did he, abandoning steam at the height of his own sales in 1902. But the Stanleys loved their steamers. Their contractual obligations to Barber being discharged in 1901, they went back into business on their own. One of the longest lasting holdouts, Stanley sold cars well into the 1920s (even after the death of Francis in a car accident in 1918), and the name became synonymous with steam. For that reason, one might be tempted to ascribe the death of the steam car to some individual failing of the Stanleys: “Yankee Tinkerers,” they remained committed to craft manufacturing and did not adopt the mass-production “Fordist” methods of Detroit. Already wealthy from their dry plate business, they did not commit themselves fully to the automobile, allowing themselves to be distracted by other hobbies, such as building a hotel in Colorado so that people could film scary movies there.[11]Some of the internal machinery of a late-model Stanley steamer: the boiler at top left, burner at center left, engine at top right, and engine cutaway at bottom right. [Stanley W. Ellis, Smogless Days: Adventures in Ten Stanley Steamers (Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1971), 22]But, as we have seen, there were dozens of steam car makers, just as there were dozens of makers of combustion cars; no idiosyncrasies of the Stanley psychology or business model can explain the entire market’s shift from one form of power train to another—if anything it was the peculiar psychology of the Stanleys that kept them making steam cars at all, rather than doing the sensible thing and shifting to combustion. Nor did the powers that be put their finger on the scale to favor combustion engines.[12] How, then, can we explain both the precipitous rise of steam in the U.S. (as opposed to its poor showing in France) as well as its sudden fall?The steam car’s defects were as obvious as its advantages. Most annoying was the requirement to build up a head of steam before you could go anywhere: this took about ten minutes for the Locomobile. Whether starting or going, the controls were complex to manage. Scientific American described the “quite simple” steps required to get a Serpollet car going:A small quantity of alcohol is used to heat the burner, which takes about five minutes; then by the small pump a pressure is made in the oil tank and the cock opened to the burner, which lights up with a blue flame, and the boiler is heated up in two or three minutes. The conductor places the clutch in the middle position, which disconnects the motor from the vehicle and regulates the motor to the starting position, then puts his foot on the admission pedal, starting the motor with the least pressure and heating the cylinders, the oil and water feed working but slightly. When the cylinders are heated, which takes but a few strokes of the piston, the clutch is thrown on the full or wean speed and the feed-pumps placed at a maximum, continuing to feed by hand until the vehicle reaches a certain speed by the automatic feed, which is then regulated as desired.[13]Starting a combustion car of that era also required procedures long-since streamlined away—cranking the engine to life, adjusting the carburetor choke and spark plug timing—but even at the time most writers considered steamers more challenging to operate. Part of the problem was that the boilers were intentionally small (to allow them to build steam quickly and reduce the risk of explosion), which meant lots of hands-on management to keep the steam level just right. Nor had the essential thermodynamic facts changed – internal combustion, operating over a larger temperature gradient, was more efficient than steam. The Model T could drive fifteen to twenty miles on a gallon of fuel, the Stanley could go only ten, not to mention its constant thirst for water, which added another “fueling” requirement.[14]The rather arcane controls of a 1912 Stanley steamer. [Ellis, Smogless Days: Adventures in Ten Stanley Steamers, 26]The steam car overcame these disadvantages to achieve its early success in the U.S. because of the delayed start of the automobile industry there. American steam car makers, starting later, skipped straight to petroleum-fueled burners, bypassing all the frustrations of dealing with a traditional coal-fueled firebox, and banishing all associations between that cumbersome appliance and the steam car.At the same time, combustion automobile builders in the U.S. were still early in their learning curve compared to those in France. A combustion engine was a more complex and temperamental machine than a steam engine, and it took time to learn how to build them well, time that gave steam (and electric) cars a chance to find a market. The builders of combustion engines, as they learned from experience, rapidly improved their designs, while steam cars improved relatively little year over year.Most importantly, they never could get up and running as quickly as a combustion engine. In one of those ironies which history graciously provides to the historian, the very impatience that the steam age had brough forth doomed its final progeny, the steam car. It wasn’t possible to start up a steam car and immediately drive; you always had to wait for the car to be ready. And so drivers turned to the easier, more convenient alternative, to the frustration of steam enthusiasts, who complained of “[t]his strange impatience which is the peculiar quirk of the motorist, who for some reason always has been in a hurry and always has expected everything to happen immediately.”[15] Later Stanleys offered a pilot light that could be kept burning to maintain steam, but “persuading motorists, already apprehensive about the safety of boilers, to keep a pilot light burning all night in the garage proved a hard sell.”[16] It was too late, anyway. The combustion-driven automotive industry had achieved critical mass.The Afterlife of the Steam CarThe Ford Model T of 1908 is the most obvious signpost for the mass-market success of the combustion car. But for the moment that steam was left in the dust, we can look much earlier, to the Oldsmobile “curved dash,” which first appeared in 1901 and reached its peak in 1903, when 4,000 were produced, three times the total output of all steam car makers in that pivotal year of 1900. Ransom Olds, son of a blacksmith, grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and caught the automobile bug as a young man in 1887. Like many contemporaries, he built steamers at first (the easier option), but after driving a Daimler car at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, he got hooked on combustion. His Curved Dash (officially the Model R) still derived from the old-fashioned “horseless carriage” style of design, not yet having adopted the forward engine compartment that was already common in Europe by that time. It had a modest single-cylinder, five-horsepower engine tucked under the seats, and an equally modest top speed of twenty miles-per-hour. But it was convenient and inexpensive enough to outpace all of the steamers in sales.[17]The Oldsmobile “Curved Dash” was celebrated in song.The market for steam cars was reduced to driving enthusiasts, who celebrated its near-silent operation (excepting the hiss of the burner), the responsiveness of its low-end torque, and its smooth acceleration without any need for clunky gear-shifting. (There is another irony in the fact that late-twentieth century driving enthusiasts, disgusted by the laziness of automatic transmissions, would celebrate the hands-on responsiveness of manual shifters.) The steam partisan was offended by the unnecessary complexity of the combustion automobile. They liked to point out how few moving parts the steam car had.[18] To imagine the triumph of steam is to imagine a world in which the car remained an expensive hobby for this type of car enthusiast.Several entrepreneurs tried to revive the steamer over the years, most notably the Doble brothers, who brought their steam car enterprise to Detroit in 1915, intent on competing head-to-head with combustion. They strove to make a car that was as convenient as possible to use, with a condenser to conserve water, key-start ignition, simplified controls, and a very fast-starting boiler.But, meanwhile, car builders were steadily scratching off all of the advantages of steam within the framework of the combustion car. Steam cars, like electric cars, did not require the strenuous physical effort to get running that early, crank-started combustion engines did. But by the second decade of the twentieth century, car makers solved this problem by putting a tiny electric car powertrain (battery and motor) inside every combustion vehicle, to bootstrap the starting of the engine. Steam cars offered a smoother, quieter ride than the early combustion rattletraps, but more precisely machined, multi-cylinder engines with anti-knock fuel canceled out this advantage (the severe downsides of lead as an anti-knock agent were not widely recognized until much later). Steam cars could accelerate smoothly without the need to shift gears, but then car makers created automatic transmissions. In the 1970s, several books advocated a return to the lower-emissions burners of steam cars for environmental reasons, but then car makers adopted the catalytic converter.[19]It’s not that a steam car was impossible, but that it was unnecessary. Every year more and more knowledge and capital flowed into the combustion status quo, the cost of switching increased, and no sufficiently convincing reason to do so ever appeared. The failure of the steam car was not due to accident, not due to conspiracy, and certainly not due to any individual failure of the Stanleys, but due to the expansion of auto sales to people who cared more about getting somewhere than about the machine that got them there. Impatient people, born, ironically, of the steam age.

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The Era of Fragmentation, Part 4: The Anarchists

Between roughly 1975 and 1995, access to computers accelerated much more quickly than access to computer networks. First in the United States, and then in other wealthy countries, computers became commonplace in the homes of the affluent, and nearly ubiquitous in institutions of higher education. But if users of those computers wanted to connect their machines together – to exchange email, download software, or find a community where they could discuss their favorite hobby, they had few options. Home users could connect to services like CompuServe. But, until the introduction of flat monthly fees in the late 1980s, they charged by the hour at rates relatively few could afford. Some university students and faculty could connect to a packet-switched computer network, but many more could not. By 1981, only about 280 computers had access to ARPANET. CSNET and BITNET would eventually connect hundreds more, but they only got started in the early 1980s. At that time the U.S. counted more than 3,000 institutions of higher education, virtually all of which would have had multiple computers, ranging from large mainframes to small workstations. Both communities, home hobbyists and those academics who were excluded from the big networks, turned to the same technological solution to connect to one another. They hacked the plain-old telephone system, the Bell network, into a kind of telegraph, carrying digital messages instead of voices, and relaying messages from computer to computer across the country and the world. These were among the earliest peer-to-peer computer networks. Unlike CompuServe and other such centralized systems, onto which home computers latched to drink down information like so many nursing calves, information spread through these networks like ripples on a pond, starting from anywhere and ending up everywhere. Yet they still became rife with disputes over politics and power. In the late 1990s, as the Internet erupted into popular view, many claimed that it would flatten social and economic relations. By enabling anyone to connect with anyone, the middle men and bureaucrats who had dominated our lives would find themselves cut out of the action. A new era of direct democracy and open markets would dawn, where everyone had an equal voice and equal access. Such prophets might have hesitated had they reflected on what happened on Usenet and Fidonet in the 1980s. Be its technical substructure ever so flat, every computer network is embedded within a community of human users. And human societies, no matter how one kneads and stretches, always seem to keep their lumps. Usenet In the summer of 1979, Tom Truscott was living the dream life for a young computer nerd. A grad student in computer science at Duke University with an interest in computer chess, he landed an internship at Bell Labs’ New Jersey headquarters, where he got to rub elbows with the creators of Unix, the latest craze to sweep the world of academic computing. The origins of Unix, like those of the Internet itself, lay in the shadow of American telecommunications policy. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs decided in the late 1960s to build a leaner, much pared-down version of the massive MIT Multics system to which they had contributed as software developers. The new operating system quickly proved a hit within the labs, popular for its combination of low overhead (allowing it to run on even inexpensive machines) and high flexibility. However, AT&T could do little to profit from their success. A 1956 agreement with the Justice Department required AT&T to license non-telephone technologies to all comers at a reasonable rate, and to stay out of all business sectors other than supplying common carrier communications. So AT&T began to license Unix to universities for use in academic settings on very generous terms. These early licensees, who were granted access to the source code, began building and selling their own Unix variants, most notably the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix created at the the University of California’s flagship campus. The new operating system quickly swept academia. Unlike other popular operating systems, such as the DEC TENEX / TOPS-20, it could run on hardware from a variety of vendors, many of them offering very low-cost machines. And Berkeley distributed the software for only a nominal fee, in addition to the modest licensing fee from AT&T.1 Truscott felt that he sat at the root of all things, therefore, when he got to spend the summer as Ken Thompson’s intern, playing a few morning rounds of volleyball before starting work at midday, sharing a pizza dinner with his idols, and working late into the night slinging code on Unix and the C programming language. He did not want to give up the connection to that world when his internship ended, and so as soon as he returned to Duke in the fall, he figured out how to connect the computer science department’s Unix-equipped PDP 11/70 back to the mothership in Murray Hill, using a program written by one of his erstwhile colleagues, Mike Lesk. It was called uucp – Unix to Unix copy – and it was one of a suite of “uu” programs new to the just-released Unix Version 7, which allowed one Unix system to connect to another over a modem. Specifically, uucp allowed one to copy files back and forth between the two connected computers, which allowed Truscott to exchange email with Thompson and Ritchie. Undated photo of Tom Truscott It was Truscott’s fellow grad student, Jim Ellis, who had installed the new Version 7 on the Duke computer, but even as the new upgrade gave with one hand, it took away with the other. The news program that was distributed by the Unix users’ group, USENIX, which would broadcast news items to all users of a given Unix computer system, no longer worked on the new operating ssytem. Truscott and Ellis decided they would replace it with their own 7-compatible news program, with more advanced features, and return their improved software back to the community for a little bit of prestige. At this same time, Truscott was also using uucp to connect with a Unix machine at the University of North Carolina ten miles to the southwest in Chapel Hill, and talking to a grad student there named Steve Bellovin.2 Bellovin had also started building his own news program, which notably included the concept of topic-based newsgroups, to which one could subscribe, rather than only having a single broadcast channel for all news. Bellovin, Truscot and Ellis decided to combine their efforts and build a networked news system with newsgroups, that would use uucp to share news between sites. They intended to distributed provide Unix-related news for USENIX members, so they called their system Usenet.  Duke would serve as the central clearinghouse at first, using its auto-dialer and uucp to connect to each other site on the network at regular intervals, in order to pick up it local news updates and deposit updates from its peers. Bellovin wrote the initial code, but it used shell scripts that operated very slowly, so Stephen Daniel, another Duke grad student, rewrote the program in C. Daniel’s version became know as A News. Ellis promoted the program at the January 1980 Usenix conference in Boulder, Colorado, and gave away all eighty copies of the software that he had brought with him. By the next Usenix conference that summer, the organizers had added A News to the general software package that they distributed to all attendees. The creators described the system, cheekily, as a “poor man’s ARPANET.” Though one may not be accustomed to thinking of Duke as underprivileged, it did not have the clout in the world of computer science necessary at the time to get a connection to that premiere American computer network. But access to Usenet required no one’s permission, only a Unix system, a modem, and the ability to pay the phone bills for regular news transfers, requirements that virtually any institution of higher education could meet by the early 1980s. Private companies also joined up with Usenet, and helped to facilitate the spread of the network. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) agreed to act as an intermediary between Duke and UC Berkeley, footing the long-distance telephone bills for inter-coastal data transfer. This allowed Berkeley to become a second, west-coast hub for Usenet, connecting up UC San Francisco, UC San Diego, and others, including Sytek, an early LAN business. The connection to Berkeley, an ARPANET site, also enabled cross-talk between ARPANET and Usenet (after a second re-write by Mark Horton and Matt Glickman to create B News). ARPANET sites began picking up Usenet content and vice versa, though ARPA rules technically forbid interconnection with other networks. The network grew rapidly, from fifteen sites carrying ten posts a day in in 1980, to 600 sites and 120 posts in 1983, and 5000 sites and 1000 posts in 1987.3 Its creators had originally conceived Usenet as a way to connect the Unix user community and discuss Unix developments, and to that end they created two groups, net.general and net.v7bugs (the latter for discussing problems with the latest version of Unix). However they left the system entirely open for expansion. Anyone was free to create a new group under “net”, and users very quickly added non-technical topics such as net.jokes. Just as one was free to send whatever one chose, recipients could also ignore whatever groups they chose, e.g. a system could join Usenet and request data only for net.v7bugs, ignoring the rest of the content. Quite unlike the carefully planned ARPANET, Usenet self-organized, and grew in an anarchic way overseen by no central authority. Yet out of this superficially democratic medium a hierarchical order quickly emerged, with a certain subset of highly-connected, high-traffic sites recognized as the “backbone” of the system. This process developed fairly naturally. Because each transfer of data from one site to the next incurred a communications delay, each new site joining the network had a strong incentive to link itself to an already highly-connected node, to minimize the number of hops required for their messages to span the network. The backbone sites were a mix of educational and corporate sites, usually led by one headstrong individual willing to take on the thankless tasks involved in administering all the activity crossing their computer. Gary Murakami at Bell Labs’ Indian Hills lab in Illinois, for example, or Gene Spafford at Georgia Tech. The most visible exercise of the power held by this backbone administrators came in 1987, when they pushed through a re-organization of the newsgroup namespace into seven top-level buckets. comp, for example, for computer-related topics, and rec for recreational topics. Sub-topics continued to be organized hierarchically underneath the “big seven”, such as comp.lang.c for discussion of the C programming language, and rec.games.board for conversations about boardgaming. A group of anti-authoritarians, who saw this change as a coup by the “Backbone Cabal,” created their own splinter hierarchy rooted at alt, with its own parallel backbone. It included topics that were considered out-of-bounds for the big seven, such as sex and recreational drugs (e.g. alt.sex.pictures)4, as well as quirky groups that simply rubbed the backbone admins the wrong way (e.g. alt.gourmand; the admins preferred the anodyne rec.food.recipes). Despite these controversies, by the late 1980s, Usenet had become the place for the computer cognoscenti to find trans-national communities of like-minded individuals. In 1991 alone, Tim Berners-Lee announced the creation of the World Wide Web on alt.hypertext; Linus Torvalds solicited comp.os.minix for feedback on his new pet project, Linux; and Peter Adkison, due to a post on rec.games.design about his game company, connected with Richard Garfield, a collaboration that would lead to the creation of the card game Magic: The Gathering. FidoNet But even as the poor man’s ARPANET spread across the globe, microcomputer hobbyists,  with far fewer resources than even the smallest of colleges, were still largely cut off from the experience of electronic communication. Unix, a low-cost, bare-bones option by the standards of academic computing, was out of reach for hobbyists with 8-bit microprocessors, running an operating system called CP/M that barely did anything beyond managing the disk drive. But they soon began their own shoe-string experiments in low-cost peer-to-peer networking, starting with something called bulletin boards. Given the simplicity of the idea and the number of computer hobbyists in the wild at the time, it seems probable that the computer bulletin board was invented independently several times. But tradition gives precedence to the creation of Ward Christensen and Randy Suess of Chicago, launched during the great blizzard of 1978.  Christensen and Suess were both computer hobbyists in their early thirties, and members of their local computer club. For some time they had been considering creating a server where computer club members could upload news articles, using the modem file transfer software that Christensen had written for CP/M – the hobbyist equivalent of uucp. The blizzard, which kept them housebound for several days, gave them the impetus to actually get started on the project, with Christensen focusing on the software and Suess on the hardware. In particular, Suess devised a circuit that automatically rebooted the computer into the BBS software each time it detected an incoming caller, a necessary hack to ensure the system was in a good state to receive the call, given the flaky state of hobby hardware and software at the time. They called their invention CBBS, for Computerized Bulletin Board System, but most later system operators (or sysops) would drop the C and call their service a BBS.5 They published the details of what they had built in a popular hobby magazine, Byte, and a slew of imitators soon followed. Another new piece of technology, the Hayes Modem, fertilized this flourishing BBS scene. Dennis Hayes was another computer hobbyist, who wanted to use a modem with his new machine, but the existing commercial offerings fell into two categories: devices aimed at business customers that were too expensive for hobbyists, and acoustically-coupled modems. To connect a call on an acoustically-coupled modem you first had to dial or answer the phone manually, and then place the handset onto the modem so they could communicate. There was no way to automatically start a call or answer one. So, in 1977, Hayes designed, built, and sold his own 300 bit-per-second modem that would slot into the interior of a hobby computer. Suess and Christensen used one of these early-model Hayes modems in their CBBS. Hayes’ real breakthrough product, though, was the 1981 Smartmodem, which sat in its own external housing with its own built-in microprocessor and connected to the computer through its serial port. It sold for $299, well within reach of hobbyists who habitually spent a few thousand dollars on their home computer setups. The 300 baud Hayes Smartmodem One of those hobbyists, Tom Jennings, set in motion what became the Usenet of BBSes. A programmer for Phoenix Software in San Francisco, Jennings decided in late 1983 to write his own BBS software, not for CP/M, but for the latest and greatest microcomputer operating system, Microsoft DOS. He called it Fido, after a computer he had used at his work, so-named for its mongrel-like assortment of parts. John Madill, a salesman at ComputerLand in Baltimore, learned about Fido and called all the way across the country to ask Jennings for help in tweaking Fido to make it run on his DEC Rainbow 100 microcomputer. The two began a cross-country collaboration on the software, joined by another Rainbow enthusiast, Ben Baker of St. Louis. All three racked up substantial long-distance phone bills as they logged into one another’s machines for late-night BBS chats. With all of this cross-BBS chatter, an idea began to buzz forward from the back of Jennings’ mind, that he could create a network of BBSes that would exchange messages late at night, when long-distance rates were low. The idea was not new. Many hobbyists had imagined that BBSes could route messages in this way, all the way back to Christensen and Suess’ Byte article. But they generally had assumed that for the scheme to work, you would need very high BBS density and complex routing rules, to ensure that all the calls remained local, and thus toll-free, even when relaying messages from coast to coast. But Jennings did some back-of-the-envelope math and realized that, given increasing modem speeds (now up to 1200 bits per second for hobby modems) and falling long-distance costs, no such cleverness was necessary. Even with substantial message traffic, you could pass text between systems for a few bucks per night. Tom Jennings in 2002 (still from the BBS documentary) So he added a new program to live alongside Fido. Between one to two o’clock in the morning, Fido would shut down and FidoNet would start up. It would check Fido’s outgoing messages against a file called the node list. Each outgoing message had a node number, and each entry in the list represented a network node – a Fido BBS – and provided the phone number for that node number. If there were pending outgoing messages, FidoNet would dial up each of the corresponding BBSes on the node list and transfer the messages over to the FidoNet program waiting on the other side. Suddenly Madill, Jennings and Baker could collaborate easily and cheaply, though at the cost of higher latency – they wouldn’t receive any messages sent during the day until the late night transfer began. Formerly, hobbyists rarely connected with others outside their immediate area, where they could make toll-free calls to their local BBS. But if that BBS connected into FidoNet, users could suddenly exchange email with others all across the country. And so the scheme proved immensely popular, and the number of FidoNet nodes grew rapidly, to over 200 within a year. Jennings’ personal curation of the node list thus became less and less manageable. So during the first “FidoCon” in St. Louis, Jennings and Baker met in the living room of Ken Kaplan, another DEC Rainbow fan who would take an increasingly important role in the leadership of FidoNet. They came up with a new design that divided North America into nets, each consisting of many nodes. Within each net, one administrative node would take on the responsibility of  managing its local nodelist, accepting inbound traffic to its net, and forwarding those messages to the correct local node. Above the layer of nets were zones, which covered an entire continent. The system still maintained one global nodelist with the phone numbers of every FidoNet computer in the world, so any node could theoretically directly dial any other to deliver messages. This new architecture allowed the system to continue to grow, reaching almost 1,000 nodes by 1986 and just over 5,000 by 1989. Each of these nodes (itself a BBS) likely averaged 100 or so active users. The two most popular applications were the basic email service that Jennings had built into FidoNet and Echomail, created by Jeff Rush, a BBS sysop in Dallas. Functionally equivalent to Usenet newsgroups, Echomail allowed the thousands of users of FidoNet to carry out public discussions on a variety of topics. Echoes, the term for individual groups, had mononyms rather than the hierarchical names of Usenet, ranging from AD&D to MILHISTORY to ZYMURGY (home beer brewing). Jennings, philosophically speaking, inclined to anarchy, and wanted to build a neutral platform governed only by its technical standards6: I said to the users that they could do anything they wanted …I’ve maintained that attitude for eight years now, and I have never had problems running BBSs. It’s the fascist control freaks who have the troubles. I think if you make it clear that the callers are doing the policing–even to put it in those terms disgusts me–if the callers are determining the content, they can provide the feedback to the assholes. Just as with Usenet, however, the hierarchical structure of FidoNet made it possible for some sysops to exert more power than others, and rumors swirled of a powerful cabal (this time headquartered in St. Louis), seeking to take control of the system from the people. In particular, many feared that Kaplan or others around him would try to take the system commercial and start charging access to FidoNet. Of particular suspicion was the International FidoNet Association (IFNA), a non-profit that Kaplan had founded to help defray some of the costs of administering the system (especially the long-distance telephone charges). In 1989 those suspicions seemed to be realized when a group of IFNA leaders pushed through a referendum to make every FidoNet sysop a member of IFNA and turn it into the official governing body of the net, responsible for its rules and regulations. The measure failed, and IFNA was dissolved instead. Of course, the absence of any symbolic governing body did not eliminate the realities of power; the regional nodelist administrators instead enacted policy on an ad hoc basis. The Shadow of Internet From the late 1980s onward, FidoNet and Usenet gradually fell under the looming shadow of the Internet. By the second half of that same decade, they had been fully assimilated by it. Usenet became entangled within the webs of the Internet through the creation of NNTP – Network News Transfer Protocol – in early 1986. Conceived by a pair of University of California students (one in San Diego and the other in Berkeley), NNTP allowed TCP/IP network hosts on the Internet to create Usenet-compatible news servers. Within a few years, the majority of Usenet traffic flowed across such links, rather than uucp connections over the plain-old telephone network. The independent uucp network gradually fell into disuse, and Usenet became just another application atop TCP/IP transport. The immense flexibility of the Internet’s layered architecture made it easy to absorb a single-application network in this way.  Although by the early 1990s, several dozen gateways between FidoNet and Internet existed, allowing the two networks to exchange messages, FidoNet was not a single application, and so its traffic did not migrate onto the internet in the same way as Usenet. Instead, as people outside academia began looking for Internet access for the first time in the second half of the 1990s, BBSes gradually found themselves either absorbed into the Internet or reduced to irrelevance. Commercial BBSes generally fell into the first category. These mini-CompuServes offered BBS access for a monthly fee to thousands of users, and had multiple modems for accepting simultaneous incoming connections. As commercial access to the Internet became possible, these businesses connected their BBS to the nearest Internet network and began offering access to their customers as part of a subscription package. With more and more sites and services becoming available on the burgeoning World Wide Web, fewer and fewer users signed on to the BBS per se, and thus these commercial BBSes gradually became pure internet service providers, or ISPs. Most of the small-time hobbyist BBSes, on the other hand, became ghost towns, as users wanting to tap into the Internet flocked to their local ISPs, as well as to larger, nationally known outfits such as America Online. That’s all very well, but how did the Internet become so dominant in the first place? How did an obscure academic system, spreading gradually across elite universities for years while systems like Minitel, CompuServe and Usenet were bringing millions of users online, suddenly explode into the foreground, enveloping like kudzu all that had come before it? How did the Internet become the force that brought the era of fragmentation to an end? [Previous] [Next] Further Reading / Watching Ronda Hauben and Michael Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, (online 1994, print 1997) Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (1993) Peter H. Salus, Casting the Net (1995) Jason Scott, BBS: The Documentary (2005)

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