(One key member of the team, Bernie Cosell, missed the photograph.) The Interface Message Processor team at BBN in 1969 (from left to right): Jim Geisman, Dave Walden, and Will Crowther crouch in the center surrounding them are Truett Thach, Bill Bartel, Frank Heart, Ben Barker, Marty Thrope, Severo Ornstein, and Bob Kahn. Ornstein became the hardware engineering lead and brought his Harvard students (and College radio station WHRB engineers) Barker and Marty Thrope onto the team (see the photo below). The IMP (which Ted Kennedy once hilariously mischaracterized as an Interfaith Message Processor) was the electronic switching device that would glue heterogeneous host computers together to form the ARPAnet.
BBN won a contract from ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense) to design the first Interface Message Processor. Ornstein was an engineer at the Cambridge firm of Bolt Beranek and Newman (which had been co-founded by Leo Beranek, Ph.D. So when Ben Barker studied hardware design as a Harvard sophomore, his instructor was a part-time adjunct faculty member named Severo Ornstein. (For more on Aiken, see the review, “Computing’s Cranky Pioneer, ” May-June 1999, page 25.) The action in hardware had moved, first to Penn and then to bigger engineering schools and industrial organizations. Notwithstanding the pioneering work of professor of applied mathematics Howard Aiken in the 1930s on the Mark I, his massive electromechanical calculator, by 1960 Harvard was not a place to study circuitry or computer design. As with so many critical advances, the circumstances were somewhat accidental. And Harvard fingerprints are on the internet’s embryo. No information infrastructure has been more consequential than the internet-arguably the most important information technology since Gutenberg made movable type practical. A senior mechanical engineer of forbidding mien snorted surely not: Harvard had never offered a degree in automotive science, why would we create one in computer science? I waited until I had tenure before trying again (and succeeding) in 1982.īut there we were, in our teens and twenties in the Aiken lab, laying some of the foundation stones on which the field has been erected. Four years later, as a still-junior faculty member, I tried to get my colleagues in DEAP (the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, now SEAS, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) to create an undergraduate computer-science degree.
I joined the faculty in 1974, right after completing my graduate work. The University remained blind to the future of computing for a long time. Harvard didn’t even call what we were doing computer science our degrees are mostly in applied mathematics, mathematics, or physics. One thing was clear: we hadn’t understood how the work we were doing would change the world. Rip van Winkles who had never fallen asleep, we gathered to make sense of what had evolved from our experience as undergraduates and Ph.D. Thirty veterans of Harvard’s Aiken Computation Lab reunited on January 19, 2020, some 50 years after each of us had a role in creating today’s networked, information-rich, artificially intelligent world.
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