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When planning began for the IMPs, four university
research centers were chosen for the initial test sites. The decision
on which university received an IMP was based on the specialties of
each research center.
Len Kleinrock, at UCLA, was one
of the leading
experts on packet-switching networks, so he would receive the first
IMP and test the network as it was built and used. The second IMP would
go to Stanford, where
Doug Engelbart would manage the
Network Information
Center (NIC) providing a network home for ARPAnet documentation.
Sutherland
(the second director of IPTO), was researching computer graphics at
the University of Utah, so the third IMP would go there. The fourth
IMP would go to the University of California at Santa Barbara where
research was conducted on interactive computer graphics.
On Labor Day, the IMP was carted up to Kleinrock's lab
and connected to a power source by a BBN engineer. When it was powered
up, it started working where it had left off back in Cambridge. Unlike the
temporary memory used in today's computers, the IMP used core memory
that didn't forget anything when it was powered off. When they connected
the Sigma 7 to the IMP, the mainframe and the IMP communicated with
each other just as planned.
Logging In
"Did you get the L?" Charlie Klein, an undergraduate at UCLA, asked.
"Yes," came the answer from Stanford. "Did you get the O?" asked UCLA.
"Yes," answered Stanford. When Klein typed 'G' another first occurred -
the network crashed.
Did You Get
the "L"?
Len
Kleinrock's graduate students had found out about the problems BBN
was having with the IMP, so they guessed that BBN would need to set
the date back and give them more time to finish programming the software
interface. However, on August 29th, the day before Labor Day, the IMP
was delivered to the Stanford shipping dock as planned.
Steve Crocker,
the graduate student responsible for the host-to-IMP software, heard
the news two days earlier and was a little surprised. He spent all
night finishing the interface for the Sigma 7 mainframe.
A month later, the second IMP was installed at the Stanford Research
Institute (SRI). They had a SDS-940 mainframe computer connected to the
IMP, so a different interface was written by the graduate students at
Stanford. When it was working they were ready to test the first connection
in the ARPANET, so they got on the phone with UCLA and coordinated the
login.
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