Finding Receptive Ears
Baran persevered, preparing briefings that demonstrated why his system was feasible. Finally, his persistence paid off in 1965. The Air Force was in charge of strategic communications at the time, and it formed a committee to investigate Baran's work. When the committee approved it, the search was on for a company to implement the distributed digital network.
AT&T would have been the ideal choice, since it was the premier communications company at the time. But it refused, claiming first that the system would not work. Its second excuse was that Baran's network would require a complete revamp of current networks. AT&T was used to adding to systems in place, not renovating them.
"And why would they want to set up a competitor to themselves?" Baran asks, emphasizing that his ideas had the quiet support of some of the scientists at Bell Labs, AT&T's research arm.
Two years later, Robert Taylor, leader of the Department of Defense's new Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), wanted to focus the agency on networking projects. So, he hired computer scientist Larry Roberts to manage the project. After reading about Baran's work and the work of British scientist Donald Davies, who also developed a concept of packet switching, Roberts decided a good first step would be to connect computers for research.
From Research to Shopping and Beyond
So birthed ARPANET, facilitating communications between researchers and letting them share remote computing resources. With the first four nodes online in December 1969, ARPANET had grown to 16 hubs, mostly universities, by March 1971. And researchers weren't just exchanging papers. They turned ARPANET into a high-speed electronic post office for exchanging random notes, ideas, and personal information.
The "consumer" version of ARPANET, the Internet, had taken off by 1983. Baran's vision, which he presented to the American Marketing Association in a 1966 paper titled "Marketing in the year 2000," was coming into fruition. He predicted consumers would one day do their shopping via a virtual department store, clicking on desired items on a TV set.
"That turned out to be pretty accurate," he says.
While he remained a consultant to ARPANET and Internet projects, Baran's main work has been forming startups based on new technologies that he forges. He has started seven companies, five of which have gone public and three of which have been valued at over $1 billion. And he's picked up a number of awards, like the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the Marconi Fellowship Prize, and the Franklin Institute Bower Award for Science.
"I'm a techie," he says. "I come up with an idea for technology and it seems to make sense, so I develop it. I've had good luck."
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