Huge sums of money are about to be spent …There is no one overriding vision … There is a potential for enormous disasters … It’s going to pervade our lives.
Predictor: Kleinrock, Leonard
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Network World, Adam Gaffin talks with Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock just before he and a group of other Internet founders met for a gathering to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their invention. Gaffin writes: ”Twenty-five years after its first two computers were linked, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) has turned into the global Internet, with 3.2 million hosts and millions of users … ‘We had no idea what we were creating,’ said Leonard Kleinrock, chairman of the computer science department at UCLA, home to the first node on the network, originally sponsored by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Kleinrock was one of several ARPANET founders who spoke to Network World On Sept. 10, the ARPANET’s builders will gather in Boston to commemorate their pioneering work, at a ceremony sponsored by Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., the company chosen to build the Net’s first messaging switches. The founders will stroll down memory lane … [and] also look forward. They foresee continued exponential growth for the Internet, provided it can overcome a series of technological, economic and political obstacles … [Kleinrock] is chairman for a National Research Council task force looking at ways to build the National Information Infrastructure. ‘Huge sums of money are about to be spent,’ he said. Vital is government oversight to ensure that this new infrastructure can handle what are now disparate forms of communications. ‘There is no one overriding vision’ at this point as to where a digital nation should be heading, he said. Kleinrock said he worries about the potential for failure as the Internet grows larger and more important and as the software grows more complex. ‘There is a potential for enormous disasters,’ he said. Any Net crisis will likely come about because of some unforeseen software glitch rather than a hardware problem, he predicted. Internet advocates point to the Net’s self-healing ability – packets get routed around trouble spots. But Kleinrock noted that a similar capacity was promised for telephone switches, which have sometimes failed … Kleinrock sees no end to the Net’s growth. ‘It’s going to pervade our lives,’ he said.”
Biography:Leonard Kleinrock published the first paper on packet-switching theory in the RLE Quarterly Progress Report while at MIT in 1961. He established the Network Measurement Center at UCLA and worked in the area of digital networks. He also published a comprehensive look at digital networks in his book “Communication Nets.” He developed the ARPANET network with Lawrence Roberts. In 1969, Kleinrock’s NMC team connected an SDS Sigma 7 computer to an Interface Messenger Processor, creating the first node on the ARPANET, the first computer to connect to the Internet. Kleinrock’s team used the early system to iron out the initial design and performance issues on the world’s first packet-switched network. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: August 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: General, Overarching Remarks
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Network World
Title, headline, chapter name: Net Pioneers See No End to Their Grand Experiment; But Global Net Faces Political, Technical Tests
Quote Type: Partial quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Section: Top News; 25 Arpanet/Internet; Page 1
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Krout, Kevin M.