How the World Got Wired · Licklider’s Dream

The Intergalactic Computer Network

When Lick arrived at ARPA, he found that there were already several big computers being paid for by his new agency. They were sitting in different universities around the country — MIT in Massachusetts, Berkeley in California, Carnegie in Pittsburgh, and others. Each university used its computer for its own research. The computers did not know about each other. They did not talk to each other. There was no reason they should have.

But Lick had been thinking.

Each of those computers was very expensive. ARPA had bought them because the research couldn’t happen without them. But every time a new research group came to ARPA wanting to do computer work, ARPA had to buy another computer for them, because the existing computers were already being used by other people. It was getting expensive. Lick’s budget could only stretch so far.

What if, Lick thought, the computers could share?

What if a scientist in Pittsburgh could, when her own computer was busy, send her program over a wire to the computer in Berkeley, run it there, and get the answer back? The Berkeley computer might be sitting idle at that moment — three in the morning, California time. The Pittsburgh scientist could use it without anyone in Berkeley even noticing. ARPA would get twice the science for the same money.

This was, on the face of it, a budgeting idea. A way to stretch a dollar. But Lick saw something larger. If computers could share work, they could also share information. A library at MIT could be read by a student in Pittsburgh. A weather model in Berkeley could be used by a scientist in Boston. Researchers around the country, around the world, could be connected to each other through their machines.

In April of 1963, Lick wrote a memo. It was addressed, with a wink, to Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network.

The memo was about a practical problem — how to get all the computers ARPA was funding to use a common system, so they could eventually talk to each other. But the title was a joke that turned out not to be a joke. Lick was sketching, in that memo, the shape of every network that would ever come after: a galaxy of computers, far apart, talking.

He addressed it to twelve people.

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