Yesterday I went to hear Katie Hafner from the NY Times talk at the LSE about the endless paternity debates for the Internet and the role of government funding in innovation. Her book written with her husband was a big influence on me when it came out in 1996, so I was interested to hear where she'd moved on to. It seems shes now interested in - among other things - Digital Preservation, but she still wants to get the facts of the Internet paternity debate right.
Hafner gave a very personal account of her interviews with the 'men of the net' such as J.C.R. Licklider (download his two most important papers here), Larry Roberts, Paul Barran, Donald Davies and Vint Cerf. She then reitterated Len Kleinrock's hang-up that he doesn't get enough of the credit, but agreed wholeheartedly with Davies' analysis that it was a very liberal interpretation of Kleinrock's dissertation to say it was packet switching, given that it only looked at one node. I must admit I'd always assumed that Donald Davies' paper in 1967 at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles was one of the seminal works in the area, and the only true debate was between Davies and Barran. And as they had no problem acknowledging that they'd both tapped into the zeitgeist at the same time, then neither should we.
Later the debate moved on to whether the creation of the Internet is an enditment of capitalism (at this point you can seamlessly interchange 'Internet' with any number of recent inventions - personal computer, computer games..) Why is it that someone at every seminar on the history of technology feels the need to go there, oh these forces for good that could only possibly have come from our own entrepreneurial and democratic structures. What do people think they were doing in the USSR when they created Tetris?!
