September 18, 2005

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Dr. I Doctor's First Podcast: An ARPAnet Pioneer Reminisces

In Dr. I Doctor's first in a series of Podcast interviews with computing pioneers, I speak with Larry Green, one of the original ARPAnet researchers and an engineer responsible for the design of the Internet Message Processor interface to IBM System/360 mainframes. Listen in as Larry describes the earliest moments of Internet history, and thinks back over a career spanning 40 years -- and still going strong!

In the mid 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) began work on the network that ultimately grew into the Internet as we know it today. The very first stage of the ARPAnet connected mainframes at just four locations over blazingly fast (for the time) 56 Kbps leased telephone lines. Larry Green was one of the engineers involved in this development at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).

Larry Green is a technologist with a long track record of founding successful computing enterprises: Communication Machinery Corporation, Efficient Networks, Wavefront Technologies, Web Power Authority, and Protocol Engines. But Larry is also an Internet pioneer, designing and deploying the Internet Message Processor (IMP) on the first node of the Internet at UCSB. While listening to this interview, be sure to browse the pictures and diagrams that Larry references as he describes those heady days of inventiveness.

Download the podcast here.

Click on any of the images below for a larger image.

Larry explains the S/360 IMP interface

"So the IMP says 'There's your IMP bit'..."

Detailed documentation for the IMP survives

ARPA Report #1822: The IMP Manual

1200 pound IMP with convenient lift rings

IMP mainframe interface protocol diagram

A detail of the UCLA IMP log book, showing the successful connection to SRI.

4-node ARPANET diagram.

ARPANET Map, 1973.

ARPANET Map, 1975.

(The podcast is an MP3 audio file playable on most any MP3 player, including Apple's iPod and free desktop software iTunes, available at http://www.apple.com/itunes)

Posted by Mel Beckman at September 18, 2005 5:15 PM