I got a chuckle over the part where UK bureaucracy saved his group from the clutches of government bodies.
British computer scientist and Internet Hall of Fame inductee Peter Kirstein died in January 2020 at the age of 86, after a nearly 50-year career at UCL. A few years before he died, he was commissioned by then Conversation technology editor Michael Parker (now director of operations) to write an in-depth piece originally intended as part of a special series on the internet. It wasn’t published at the time, as the series was postponed, but now to mark Professor Kirsten’s contributions we are delighted to be able to publish his reflections on the challenges he faced connecting the UK in the early 1970s to the forerunner of what would become the modern internet. The article was edited by Michael with oversight kindly provided by Professor Jon Crowcroft, a colleague of Professor Kirstein’s.
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As the UK side of Arpanet continued growing, additional message processors had to be imported, each one racking up additional VAT and duty to be paid, pending the outcome of the appeal. Finally in 1976 the appeal was refused. But a meeting with senior treasury officials subsequently led to an agreement that my research group would be permitted to import equipment free of VAT and duty. The importance of this ruling cannot be overemphasised for ensuring the independence of our operation: over the following decade many government bodies considered trying take it over, and each time would be discouraged by the magnitude of the VAT and duty bill they would incur.
From my read of the history, Kirstein did quite a bit more than create the first password on the internet. He was intimately involved with helping to create the first implementations of TCP/IP with Bob Kahn, along with Vint Cerf at Stanford, and Ray Tomlinson at BBN. This was why he needed to get things set up in the UK. He did his work on TCP/IP at University College in London (UCL).
I was somewhat amused by the back-to-front way the UK’s connectivity came about:
Around this time [1970 or so] the director of the Arpanet project, Larry Roberts, proposed connecting Arpanet to Davies’ NPL network in the UK. This would be possible because a few years previously a large seismic array in Norway run by Norwegian researchers for Darpa had been connected to Arpanet via a dedicated 2.4 Kbps connection to Washington. Due to the transatlantic technology of the time, this was by satellite link via the only earth station for satellite communications in Europe, in Goonhilly, Cornwall, and thence by cable to Oslo. Larry proposed to interrupt the connection in London, connect the NPL network, and then continue to Norway.
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…by 1973 the project was becoming a reality. By now the Norwegian siesmic array, Norsar, was connected to Arpanet via a newly opened satellite earth station at Tanum in Sweden, and so there was no longer a link via the UK at all. Now what was required was a link from UCL to Oslo. With a small grant of £5,000 from Donald Davies at the NPL, and the provision by the British Post Office of a 9.6 Kbps link to Oslo without charge for one year, we had the resources to proceed.
Donald Davies generosity with (presumably) NPL funds was hardly a small sum - ONS stats for inflation show £100 in 1973 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £1,545.54 today, an increase of £1,445.54 over 52 years. The pound had an average inflation rate of 5.41% per year between 1973 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 1,445.54%. So Donald’s £5000 would have been the equivalent of ~ £70k in today’s money. A gentleman of great significance in the communications and security sectors, and yet easy to get on with in projects and committee meetings such as the BCS Plastic Card Security Committee.