The world in the network the interop trade show, carl malamuds internet 1996 exposition, and the politics of internet commercialization

The World in the Network:
The Interop Trade Show, Carl Malamud's Internet 1996 Exposition,
and the Politics of Internet Commercialization
MICHVE
by

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE
OF TECHNOLOLGY

Colleen E. Kaman

JUN 2 3 2015

B.A. Anthropology
Bates College, 1995

LIBRARIES

SUBMITTED TO THE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES
AT THE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
June 2010
0 2010 Colleen Elizabeth Kaman. All rights reserved.
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute
publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any
medium now known or hereafter crerad.

Sig nature of Author:

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in Comppative Media Studies

17 May 2010

Certified b y:

Sia nature redacted
William Charles Uricchio
Professor of Comparative Media Studies
Director, Comparative Media Studies
Thesis Sufervisor
,-7 .

Accepted b

y:

Signature redacted
H'ny'Jenkins III-

Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, a Vd Cinematic Arts
Department of Communication, University of Southern California
Thesis Committee Member
Accepted by:

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Nick Montfort

Associate Professor of Digital Media
Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies
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Prologue
One starting point of this study was a curiosity about the meteoric transformation of the
Internet from an experimental research network into a global communications medium.

INTERNATIONAL CNNECTIVITY
SIntsa.t

EMU.1

Only(UUCP,Fid.N.t)

N0Conntity

Figure 1: "International Connectivity" in 1991. This map shows what countries had permanent links
to electronic networks, including the Internet. However, this map does not indicate the level or
quality of that connectivity.

INTERNATIONAL CO NECTIVITY

Blinet but not Internet
EU.Niny (UUiCP,

1No Connwctivfty

Fkd.N.*

:

1.
rn

Figure 2: "International Connectivity" in 1997. This map shows how dramatically permanent
international links to the Internet had expanded in just six years.

Copyright 1991 and 1997 Lawrence H. Landweber and the Internet Society.
Unlimited permission to copy or use is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

2

The World in the Network: The Interop Trade Show, Carl Malamud's Internet
1996 Exposition, and the Politics of Internet Commercialization

Abstract
In the early 1990s, the Internet emerged as a commercially viable global communications
medium. This study considers the role that representatives of the military-industrial
research world played in the physical expansion of the Internet. It does so by examining the
social practices and processes of the semi-annual "Interop" computer-networking trade
show, and one affiliated "exposition." Beginning in 1987, and for nearly a decade, Interop
operated as a forum that brought representatives from industry and the research and user
communities into strategic alliance to tackle the practicalities of expanding the Internet's
core networking protocols and assembling diverse networks into a global Internet. The
period examined culminates with the Internet 1996 World Exposition. Through that event,
technologist Carl Malamud drew on the rhetoric of turn-of-the-century world's fairs to
demonstrate the value of faster networks but also argued for a conception of "the commons"
that could ideally be served by the rapidly privatizing Internet. In the absence of a
comprehensive history of the commercial expansion of the Internet, analysis of these
practices provides a pioneering analytic narrative of a crucial strand of this development.
This thesis moves between levels of analysis, specifically between the Interop network, the
Internet 1996 Exposition event, and the perspective of Malamud himself. By highlighting
these hitherto neglected practices, this examination deepens our understanding of the
forces that proved critical to the Internet's commercial success.

Thesis Supervisor: William Charles Uricchio
Title: Professor of Comparative Media Studies

2

Acknowledgments

I'd like to extend my deepest thanks to the many individuals who helped me along the way.
CMS mentors William Uricchio, Henry Jenkins, and Nick Montfort provided intellectual
guidance and encouragement that greatly influenced this project as well as many other
endeavors.
I am grateful to Glorianna Davenport, Lucy Suchman, Michael Fischer, Fred Turner, and
Stefan Helmreich, who helped along the way, and to Lisa Williams, whose sketches helped
me understand protocol layers and whose stories kept my spirits high.
I would like to extend my thanks to numerous interviewees who generously gave of their
time to speak to me about their experiences as well as the technical aspects of their work in
person, by phone, and over email. These include Karl Auerbach, David Brandin, David
Clark, Dave Crocker, Tom Keating, Ole Jacobsen, Dan Lynch, Tom Keating, Carl Malamud,
Howard Rheingold, Andy Lippman, Marty Lucas, and Marshall Rose. Without their
patience and assistance, this work would never have been possible.
A special thanks goes to my entire family, who have always supported my various interests
and never failed to offer words of encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Bridget and
Anthony Barron who so generously offered their home for my numerous trips to the San
Francisco Bay area. Finally, thanks to Abdulrazzaq al-Saiedi, who kept me company and
listened to me ramble on about my thesis at all hours of the day and night.

4


List of Figures

Prologue

Figure 1: "International Connectivity" in 1991
Figure 2: "International Connectivity"

in 1997

Chapter One
Figure 3: Advertisement for the October 1, 1982 Launch of EPCOT Theme Park
Figure 4: The AT&T Network Operations Center scene, Spaceship Earth, 1984
Figure 5: AT&T's International Fiber Optic Cables, circa 1998

Chapter Three
Figure 6: Screenshot, Construction of Interop Show Network, date unknown
Figure 7: Diagram of the INTEROP90 Show Network Configuration

Chapter Four
Figure 8: Screenshot, Internet 1996 Expo website

Is


Contents

Prologue
Abstract
Acknowledgments
3
List of Figures
4
Introduction: The Commercial Sphere as a Site of Social Change
7
Chapter One: As our Thirst for Knowledge Grew, the World Began to
Shrink: Spaceship Earth as a Networked Utopia

20
Chapter Two: Internet Explorers and Digital Worlds
36
Chapter Three: I Know it Works, I Saw it at Interop
49
Chapter Four: In Truth, All the World Was There: The Internet 1996 Expo
63
Chapter Five: Conclusion
79
Appendix A: List of Interviewees
89
References
90


Introduction: The Commercial Sphere as a Site of Social Change
In 1994, Kevin Kelly -- information technology pundit and founding executive editor of
Wired, and co-founder of the online community the WELL' -- argued in "Out of Control"
that the marketplace in the emerging networked society was the site of social change. The
text, which was organized in a format similar to the Whole Earth Catalog, outlined deep
interconnections between the biological, the technological, and the social (Turner 2006,
200). Describing living systems in computer science terms, Kelly suggested that organisms
advanced by "hacking," or working-around, challenges that, over time, naturally led to
ubiquity and complexity. Likewise, Kelly asserted that technology itself had evolved such
that computer networks had transformed the corporation into a living organism,
"distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive." Such a process, Kelly believed,
signaled the emergence of a global information system that naturally guided an economy
within which men and machines would be effortlessly integrated. In other words, Kelly
downplayed the physical aspects of the global economy, including the computer-networking
hardware and production lines as well as the physical labor and relationships embedded in

these objects.
As Fred Turner has demonstrated, Kelly's argument synthesized influences that had
first formed around the Whole Earth network. The emerging society he depicted integrated
1960s-era countercultural ideals with corporate interests and the collaborative practices
and rhetoric of interconnectedness associated with the military-industrial research world
(Turner 2006, 199-206). According to Kelly, the emerging post-industrial economy was a
powerful demonstration of the deep integration of computers and computer networks in
society, revealing "a common soul between the organic communities ...

and their

manufactured counterparts of robots, corporations, economies, and computer circuits"
(Kelly 1994, 3). The world itself had become an information system, and with it, new forms,
such as the bee swarm (and with it, the "hive mind") and complex adaptive systems,
emerged to replace the hierarchical logic of the previous era. For corporate executives
trying to understand the technological and economic changes they faced, Kelly encouraged
them to "obey the logic of the net" if they hoped to succeed in the emerging economy, a
1 The WELL, or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, was founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand and Larry
Brilliant. Many of the WELL's core members were previously associated with Brand's Whole Earth
Catalog, and like the catalog, quickly became a highly influential computer conferencing system and
virtual community.
7


system in which the intangibles of the network would supersede the world of physical

objects" (1998, 160).
This countercultural worldview depended heavily on the cybernetic theories of
information management that drew connections between system social theories and objects
and systems; yet in the process of translation, the counterculture downplayed and even

obscured the physical aspects of the technologies built in the Cold War-era research labs.
Still, the physicality of computer networks represents a critical aspect of the Internet and
continues to be a site of conflict. Those conflicts range from "Denial of Service" attacks, to
edicts of national and international courts limiting the reach of information online 2 and the
control mechanisms of corporate providers and national governments, to lagging broadband
infrastructures that cause "information traffic jams" and fragment network connectivity.
The scope and increasing severity of these conflicts surrounding the physical network have
led Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain (2008) to predict that the Internet is
increasingly likely to become a "closed" technology as aspects of the technological system
that encourage experimentation and exchange are replaced by consumer "appliances" that
offer little in the way of participation.
What is it about the physical aspects of computer networks that have bedeviled
idealistic visions of the networked society? External forces, such as commercial influences
or national interests, are not simply corrupting an exceptional technology and the ideal
society it promised, as many countercultural figures supposed. Part of the answer lies with
the nature of the technology itself. When the Internet and then the World Wide Web3 first

2 LICRA v. Yahoo (2000) was the first successful international challenge to the Internet community's
argument that the Internet represents an exceptional technology that should be governed by
different means than by national laws, as are traditional communications technologies. The case
examined whether it was illegal for a Yahoo! online auction site to sell Nazi artifacts in France.
3 The World Wide Web, sometimes confused with the Internet by people who first encountered them
both at the same time (in the mid-1990s or later), was a system for making information widely
available that was conceived and pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, a British citizen working at the
CERN research institute in Switzerland. It consisted of 1) "web sites" (electronically accessible
"places") for storing text and images with a protocol for assigning each one a name (formed of
standard alphabetic and typewriter keyboard characters)-termed a URL (for Universal Resource
Locator); 2) "hypertext," text with certain words appearing on-screen as underlined or differently
colored and serving as "links" that when "clicked on" with a computer mouse, bring to the screen an
associated web site; and 3) a programming language, originally HTML ("hypertext mark-up

language"), for giving each web site a standard, widely interpretable format for its information. By
providing a network of physically connected computers on which web sites can reside, to be accessed
at any time, the Internet served as the communication infrastructure for the World Wide Web.
Conversely, the World Wide Web, by offering ever richer information content, undergirded and

A


emerged into public view in the mid-1990s, enthusiasm for networked exchange and
distributed communities all but obscured the tangle of cables and "cyberspace-warping
wires" (Stephenson 1996) as well as the significance of networked computing's history. Yet,
the Internet had a history. It is a distributed computer network created by linking together
previously existing smaller computer networks, of which the best known was the ARPAnet
(the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) network for rapid communication among
Department of Defense-linked researchers). In other words, it has its roots in the militaryresearch culture that emerged in the wake of World War II and the Cold War. The network
was developed to be independent of centralized control, flexible, and readily adaptable, such
that the technology could withstand nuclear attack. At its core, the Internet operates
according to a suite of protocols known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol) that specifies how to structure, transmit, and receive information between
dissimilar networks. 4 These protocols allowed for the ubiquitous connectivity upon which
the modern Internet is based.
Another physical aspect of distributed network technologies is their tangible
infrastructure. Since this technology often bootstraps onto existing telecommunications
wires and cables, the computer network becomes a point of conflict within existing
infrastructures, laws, and norms. In the early 1990s, for example, large-scale commercial
providers (like America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy)5 fought the organizational logic
of the Internet that allowed for peer-to-peer transmission of data packets regardless of
source or terminus. In contrast, they envisioned closed communities that offered easy-tomotivated the improvement of the capabilities of the Internet far beyond its original function of
relaying messages. Each one, an enthusiast might say, sustained and nourished the other, in a
symbiotic co-evolution powered by human sociability and curiosity.

4 TCP/IP had been developed as an experimental, U.S. military-funded solution to the technical
problem of connecting dissimilar "packet-switched" networks and earlier radio relay technologies. By
strict definition, TCP/IP is only two protocols - TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP
(Internet Protocol) - each performing a distinct function. However, the term "TCP/IP" is commonly
used to describe an entire family of protocols known as the TCP/IP protocol suite. For example, it
specifies protocols for performing tasks such as file transfer (FTP or File Transfer Protocol),
electronic mail (SMTP or Simple Mail Transport Protocol), and remote access to a computer (telnet).
The TCP/IP protocols are standards for formatting, addressing, fragmenting, delivering,
reassembling and checking transmitted information. Any computer network, even a physically
isolated one having no connection to the Internet can use TCP/IP protocols. However, many consider
the public Internet synonymous with these protocols because it is a global TCP/IP network. The
Internet is, among other things, an enormous TCP/IP network.
5
For a period account of Prodigy, see Howard Rheingold's chapter, "Disinformocracy" in The Virtual
Community: Homesteadingon the ElectronicFrontier(2000), available online at
/>
9


use services for their customers that included managing online access, exchanges on public
forums and even e-mail. By 1996, explicit regulations tempered the utopian assertions that
networked computing would (or could) challenge the legitimacy of institutions and
traditional governance structures. A law passed by Congress in 1996 marked the first
legislative attempt to regulate speech on the Internet. That same year, the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) drafted the so-called "Internet Treaties" that
would go on to play a major role in copyright disputes. 6 In fact, some of the most powerful
structuring agencies on the Internet today - the protocols and standards as well as
legislation that govern the Net (what Internet legal scholar Lawrence Lessig (1999) calls
"West Coast Code" and "East Coast Code," respectively) - largely function as invisible
infrastructures that appear as "natural" characteristics of the system and thus don't reveal

the profound relationship between discourses around a technology and its physical
attributes.
Continuing debates over the shape and limits of the Internet reveal deeper truths
about modern communications

infrastructures

and their relationship

to previous

communications systems. These debates also point to larger shifts between the relative
power of the State and private enterprise. They reveal that these technologies did not
replace Industrial-era infrastructures so much as facilitate their reorganization, and then
build upon them a new distributed management system that carried with it its own set of
operational logics. These struggles suggest questions about the role that engineers and
organizations affiliated with the military-industrial research world might have had in the
physical expansion and commercialization of the Internet: How did they understand their
roles as architects of this emerging global infrastructure? How were they able to leverage
the cybernetic discourses and interdisciplinary, collaborative practices into strategic
alliances and practical strategies for computer network expansion that worked to ensure
the global success of the Internet? Given what we already know about the militaryindustrial research world's contributions to the commercialization of the Internet, what do
their efforts to construct the physical networks reveal about the organizational strategies
that ensured the Internet's successful commercial transition?

These copyright laws include the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and
Phonograms Treaty (WPPT). In the U.S., these treaties were implemented with the passage of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998. The DMCA outlaws technologies intended to
circumvent efforts to control access to copyrighted works.
6

10(


One network of individuals who focused on the practicalities of Internet expansion,
this research suggests, were affiliated with the largely overlooked "Interop" computernetworking trade show and conference. 7 These semi-annual events, as well as the trade
shows company's associated publications and gatherings, were important for the physical
implementation of the Internet's core networking protocols that made interoperability
between distinct networks possible. Interop founder Dan Lynch assembled a core group of
Silicon Valley network engineers, vendors, and entrepreneurs associated with the militaryindustrial research world. Beginning in 1987, and for nearly a decade, these engineers
engaged with a network of people and interests from the commercial and user communities,
addressing the considerable

technical

and organizational

challenges

of creating

interoperable hardware. These network developers included engineers and entrepreneurs
such as Vint Cerf, David Clark, Karl Auerbach, Paul Mockapetris, Dave Crocker, and Carl
Malamud, as well as representatives from Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Apple, and
Digital Equipment Corporation (hereafter, DEC). Out of these encounters emerged shared
understandings of the viability of the Internet community's TCP/IP core networking
protocol, as well as how the interconnection of distinct networks might be accomplished.
The Interop trade show became a sensation, becoming one of the few places that actually
demonstrated functioning inter-networks: distinct networks that connected to one another
but also linked outward to the Internet, as well as products that functioned across the

networks themselves. Interop became one of the most respected and popular trade events in
the industry; by the early 1990s, the gathering had expanded from the U.S. (largely
California) to international locations such as Sydney, Paris, and Tokyo.
Lynch brought these different communities together in a series that since have been
described by scholars as (Turner 2006) "network forums."

Comprising a series of

conferences, events, affiliated publications, and an informal membership of scientists and
engineers, these network forums functioned as critical sites for the "translation" of
computer internetworking technologies that allowed the Internet to expand across physical
boundaries into new realms. Successful exchanges between industry, academe, and
government extended the legitimacy of the Internet community's practices and processes

7 There are numerous explanations for the Interop trade show's relative obscurity today, chief among
them the choices of the network developers themselves. They have deeply influenced the popular
history of the Internet, yet their accounts largely downplay the role of the Interop trade show and its
network, perhaps because the commercial orientation and focus on the practicalities of
implementation didn't easily map to more strictly defined technical standards-setting efforts.
11


more deeply into the realm of the massive economic and technological forces reorganizing
the global economy. These actors shared an understanding of themselves as architects of
the emerging networked society, freely integrating economic, technical, and social frames as
they envisioned a global system of interconnected computer networks crisscrossing the
globe, and what the society that supported it might be like. With each "translation" across
another domain, the vision of the Internet attracted more allies. The emerging project grew
to include previously established overseas university research relationships with
international representatives like Joichi Ito (Japan) and Jun Murai (Japan).

Together,

they would not only create the first prototypes of the global Internet but also establish the
collaborative processes that proved critical for the mutual accommodation and adaptation
required for the Internet's commercial success.
The narrative reach of this study starts in the early 1990s, as the Internet's place as
the global standard seemed increasingly fixed and the Interop's show network was in high
production. It focuses on the Interop network's role in the standardization of the Internet,
and more specifically two projects affiliated with Interop, Carl Malamud's 1993 survey of
the emerging global Internet and his Internet 1996 World Exposition. The second project,
ambitious in scale and concept, constituted an "exposition" that drew on the rhetoric of
turn-of-the-century world's fairs - first, to demonstrate the feasibility of global internetworking, but also to argue for a conception of

"the commons" that could ideally be

served by the Internet, which was rapidly becoming privatized. The 1996 exposition
launched just as the most influential engineers and entrepreneurs in the Interop network
-

began to drift away. Although computer networks were still an "unfinished" technology

they "broke down" with some frequency, were as yet unable to accommodate real-time audio
and video streams, and had yet to extend much beyond industrialized nations - the
affiliates of the Interop network had helped to create the social and technical conditions
necessary to fulfill a vision of the Internet as a global, commercially viable communications
medium.
By recounting the history of the Interop network, 8 this study considers how the
trade show network functioned alongside more explicit (and more researched) technical

8 Undoubtedly, Interop warrants a standalone analysis that might explore the trade show's role in
technical advances as well as its role in the eventual success of Internet standards in the TCP/IP
versus OSI standards war. Here, I focused on the network engineers and have not been able to
gather material on corporate projects from company archives.
12


standardization efforts, and underscores the instrumental role that the military-industrial
research world's culture had in the commercial expansion of the Internet. Alongside the
imperatives of developing and implementing computing technologies, this research culture
facilitated the development of deeply entrepreneurial and collaborative practices. These
practices coalesced in the 1980s during the computer industry's debates over "open
systems" and the creation of particular information infrastructures. At the core of these
debates were battles over different versions of standardization, which were largely fought
between the Internet protocols and those stipulated by a traditional governmental
standards process. For network engineers, as the catchphrase "rough consensus and
running code" (coined by David Clark in 1992) implies, these struggles became framed in
terms of the "social and moral order of society" (Kelty 2008, 8).
Interop founder Dan Lynch was a former ARPAnet researcher and a member and
industry representative at the Internet Architecture Board (or IAB - it was originally called
the Internet Activities Board), the core architectural leadership organization that guided
the development of the Internet. As these primarily research-oriented practices became
increasingly difficult to implement in the complex commercial and highly litigious
standards environment, Lynch and the other engineers affiliated with Interop reoriented
Internet standards-setting by applying these practices to the practical imperative of
assembling functional links between networks. By doing so, they fashioned a hybrid model
of network standardization that exposed the broader commercial community to the Internet
engineers' manner of condensing the "process of standardization and validation into
implementation" (Kelty 2008, 173) and offered useful knowledge related to the practicalities
of linking networks. Such instruction also "routinized" Internet practices: that is, Internet

leadership imposed a kind of "system" for linking computer networks and developing
products that would run on such networks that allowed them to achieve better control of
implementation and expansion processes (Yates 1993, xvii). In these ways, Interop
functioned as a critical intervention for an information technology industry in flux. The
networking industry, as well as many companies, wanted to use the standards they
themselves had chosen, which were often proprietary, rather than accept the interoperable
standards that made interconnected networks and even open markets possible (DeNardis
2009, 38; Kelty 2008, 144). Convincing them to set aside their commercial rivalries and
build functioning, testable products that were also compatible with one another (as opposed

13


to creating competing, proprietary systems to "lock" customers into specific products and
associated support resources) was both a political and a technical feat. Yet Interop's
approach proved persuasive because, in order to participate in the trade show, Interop
required vendors otherwise uninterested in the success of Internet per se to connect their
products to the show network.

Lynch and the other researchers leveraged their

considerable influence to encourage commercial networking companies to work together to
address substantial inter-networking challenges in an experimental research setting. For
vendors the hybrid setting afforded them the privacy to take risks and make mistakes away
from the competitive pressures of the marketplace.

A Note on Methodologies
This thesis builds on analytical frameworks that examine how people and things can be
translated into forces that shape society and technologies (Pinch and Bijker 1987; Turner
2006; Abbate 1999; Callon 1987), and focuses in particular on the social processes through

which a diverse set of interests can be recruited and brought into alignment. By doing so,
this analysis shifts away from an emphasis on protocols and standards as purely technical
and instead considers the expansion of technologies across domains as a complex process of
"translation" that is as much social and organizational as technical. Drawing on Janet
Abbate's definitive history of the Internet, this study demonstrates how the "kinds of social
dynamics that we associate with the use of networks also came into play during their
creation" (1999, 4). In particular, this study traces the practices and processes, which
include demonstrations and trade show exhibits, that reveal the visions that bound various
actors working to scale technologies (Nye 1994; Flichy 2007), and also the organizational
achievements that helped coordinate new methods of management that established
processes of coordination between different actors (Callon 1986; Thrift 2005; Yates 1993).
Most significantly, this examination builds on Turner's concept, mentioned earlier,
of "network forums": texts and experiences where a varied set of players meet to
collaborate, exchange ideas and legitimacy, integrate new networks, and envision
themselves as a part of a single (albeit distributed) community assembling a global,
seamless, and fundamentally liberalizing information

economy and accompanying

information society. Turner's work traces what he terms the Whole Earth network, an
intertwining of the military-industrial

research world's culture and the American

14


counterculture that helped shape the public understanding of computers and computer
networks as tools for personal expression and the creation of new social frontiers. To do so,
Turner links two theoretical perspectives from science and technology studies - in

particular Star and Griesemer's "boundary-object" concept, referring to objects that
circulate between several different social worlds but are independently meaningful for each
world - as well as Peter Galison's "trading zone," sites where representatives from various
disciplines come together to exchange ideas and collaborate, establishing "contact
languages" that facilitate shared understandings and collaboration. For example, Turner
argued that core members of the Whole Earth network came together to help create Wired
magazine, a prototype of the utopian society that networked computing would make
possible. MIT's Nicholas Negroponte used Wired as a site to claim that the Internet was
about to "flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize
people" (1995). Turner has also argued that, by the late 1980s, the Whole Earth network
functioned as a vehicle that reinvigorated the influence of the cooperative practices and
systems rhetoric of the military-industrial research world's culture in the corporate sphere.
In turn, this worked to more deeply integrate countercultural utopian visions with the
massive economic and technological forces already reorganizing the industrial world.
Expanding on Turner's framework, this study attends to the guiding visions that
mobilized multiple communities, persuading them to undertake the work of assembling the
physical networks necessary to transform the Internet into a global commercial
infrastructure. As Wiebe Bijker has noted, a technology's successful expansion is as much
dependent on these shared visions as on any qualities or affordances that technologies
might themselves possess (1997, 15). Leo Marx (1964) has termed this a "technological
sublime," referring to the notion that from new technologies would flow social and moral
progress that would liberate the human spirit and improve society. Others have written
about this imaginary; David Nye (1996) on the first transcontinental railroad, Carolyn
Marvin (1990) on electricity, Susan Douglas (1986) on wireless and the invention of
American broadcasting, and more recently Patrice Flichy (2007) on the early Internet and
Chris Kelty (2008) on the practices of the distributed collaborative creation and distribution
of software source code. 9 Kelty has suggested that proponents of these practices "mix up
operating systems and social systems" and are driven by "imaginations of order that are

9 These practices are generally referred to as Free Software, or the Free Software Movement.

15


simultaneously moral and technical" (2008, 43, 9).10 Here, Charles Taylor's work on social
imaginaries becomes useful as it recalls "the ways in which people imagine their social
existence, how they fit together with others.... [It] draws on our whole world, that is, our
sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others, and in history" (2004, 23,

28).
This research also examines the mobilization of network engineers as "systembuilders" (Hughes 1983),11 that is, they thought about their work constructing physical
networks not only in technical but also in social and economic terms. They focused in
particular on "project management" styles that emerged from the highly collaborative and
interdisciplinary work style and entrepreneurial sensibility of the military-industrial
research world. Through a variety of efforts, engineers enacted these visions by imposing
protocols, the internal logic of networks, and the expansion of those protocols through
flexible partnerships and a system of coordination. Understanding this "routinization of
innovation" (Thrift 2005, 7) has been greatly helped by JoAnne Yates' (1989) work on the
ways in which the first data processing machines led to the development of communication
systems. She has suggested that normalization occurred as management conveyed
procedures and rules to coordinate processes at lower levels and as communication flowed
upward in the form of data and analyses. As Alexander Galloway (2004) has shown in his
research on protocols, the Internet's community's codification of these technical standards
(which comprise the core functionality of the Internet) through the Request for Comments
(RFC) process suggests the importance of also examining the operational logics at the core
of complex technological systems like networks. In essence, the complex interactions
required to build such systems reveal the ways in which standards fully realized operate as
socially constituted values at every level.

Roadmap

The Internet is a complicated tangle of technologies and practices that are under constant
construction and defy easy analysis. Its history is no less complex. This study focuses on
what might be learned about the Internet's commercial transition by considering how the

Kelty has described this "social imaginary" as one that is shared between the individuals that
work to create and build Free Software and "defines a particular relationship between technology,
organs of governance (whether state, corporate, or nongovernmental) and the Internet" (2008, 12).
11 Similarly, these engineers have been termed heterogeneous engineers (Law, 1987)
10

16


network engineers and entrepreneurs, members of the Interop network, and many affiliates
of the military-industrial research world, focused on the implementation and expansion of
the TCP/IP core networking protocols. To do so, they forged strategic alliances with
commercial
emergence

interests. This study extracts one analytic narrative of the Internet's
as

a global and commercially

viable

communications

medium.

Since

infrastructural network development operates across multiple registers (Law and Callon
1992; Jackson et al. 2007; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987), this examination links the
"micro stories" of individual actors to the teams of Interop network developers as well as to
larger social processes around the emergence of the Internet. Carl Malamud provides a
through-line. He was deeply involved in the construction of computer networks in the 1980s
and 1990s and was an articulate promoter of the visions that helped drive network
construction, and also of a vision of the emerging networked society. Even so, this analysis
is not intended to be a biographical account of Malamud, or to recapitulate the entirety of
Malamud's projects in the first half of the 1990s. Many studies of the networked computing
infrastructures, and of the Internet, emphasize the innovations of Internet practices and
processes. Since, in most cases, the individuals I interviewed are still actively working in
the information technology industry (see Appendix A), and belong to groups that actively
maintain their own versions of events, some will doubtless disagree with each other, and
with the history that I have constructed.
Chapter One explores mobilizing visions as a critical element in the standardization
of the Internet. Standardization is often primarily thought of as a technical, and therefore
socially neutral, process of change. This chapter examines the more purely social and even
"commercial" aspects of achieving wider agreement on standards, focusing in particular on
idealized visions around emerging technologies and on the challenges of enacting those
visions in the midst of larger technological and economic reorganization in the global
economy. To do so, this chapter explores the Epcot theme park's "Spaceship Earth," an
exhibit

that

presents

interconnectedness.

a corporate

futurism

inspired

by

cybernetic

visions

of

It traces one aspect of the Internet's transition from a research

network into a commercially viable global infrastructure, driven by frames of connectivity

and modifiability.
Chapter Two turns to the practices by which network engineers affiliated with the
Interop trade show assumed the role of "system builders" of the physical networks, and

17


thus architects of the emerging networked society and economy. Mobilized by visions of
global connectivity and their imagined intellectual connection to the makers of earlier
modern technological systems, they helped drive the consensus and collaboration required
for the construction and assembly of a global Internet.

Chapter Three focuses on the Interop trade show itself, focusing in particular on the
semi-annual event's network, one of the most complex in the world, that functioned as a
demonstration of the emerging global Internet. This construction not only helped mobilize
engineers and vendors around Internet standards and practices but also functioned as a
hybrid research and development site that coordinated collaboration and partnerships
between representatives of a range of interests, many of whom were also fierce competitors.
Assembled by a core group of researchers with strong ties to the military-industrial
research world, Interop attended to the practicalities of implementing the Internet's core
technical standards while also negotiating powerful commercial needs as well as the larger
economic and technological forces sweeping the industrialized world.
In Chapter Four, the analysis shifts to an affiliate of Interop, Carl Malamud, and
the yearlong Internet 1996 Exposition that he conceived and produced with ample support
from the Interop Company itself. This analysis opens with Malamud's growing interest in
the ways in which better connectivity and faster networks might lead to new services and
uses, and ultimately new communities of users and consumers. A showman-intellectual in
the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, Malamud developed his exhibition in the spirit of a
"world's fair," a metaphor that reflected his preoccupation with the development of earlier
technological systems, especially railroad transportation, that promoted a particular vision
regarding the latent tension between privately managed communications systems, public
access, and the "politics of the commons." This project was realized through a series of
offline and online events, a website () aggregating numerous pieces of online
material, and a coffee-table book chronicling the exposition from inception through the
launch and conclusion of the event. Paradoxically, although many people do not consider
the exposition to have been a success, commercially or otherwise, it can still be looked to as
an alternative vision of how the networks that comprised the Internet might have
continued to develop and as a critical record of the models and discourses that existed
around Internet infrastructures.

1s

Together,

these

chapters

attend

to an aspect

of Internet

expansion

and

commercialization that has been largely overlooked in historical accounts to date. They take
seriously the challenges of translating utopian visions into commercially viable technologies
and infrastructures, and in the process, interrogate a widespread assertion that the
Internet was largely developed in the academic world that existed apart from larger
economic forces. The Internet represents significant technical achievements. This study
focuses on the degree to which technological systems must be consciously created in order
to be successful at scale. At the heart of this research, then, lay questions about the
influence of the military-industrial research world and how particular technical visions and
practicalities shaped the Internet as it transformed into a commercially viable global
infrastructure. How did the computer engineers and entrepreneurs building computer
networks employ organizational strategies and alliances that helped ensure the Internet's
place in the global landscape? How did discourses around testability and connectivity
reflect their efforts to shape the emerging information landscape? How might the Interop

trade show have functioned as an important site of negotiation for developers who worked
to shape these critical discourses, and, in the process, ensure the commercial success of the
Internet? This research suggests that the global success of the Internet should be attributed
to the reemergence of the collaborative work styles and systems rhetoric of the militaryindustrial research culture into the commercial sphere.

19


Chapter One: As Our Thirst for Knowledge Grew, the World Began to Shrink:
Epcot's Spaceship Earth as a Networked Utopia
Numerous theories of technological change have portrayed the form and function of
technologies as determined by the cultural values, interests, and interpretations of social
groups (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Bijker 1995). Among the concepts introduced is
that of "interpretive flexibility," a process suggesting there is no one, or best, way to
construct a technology. Rather, a technology's design and use is flexible. This view
emphasizes how different social groups examining the same technology will not only
identify distinct technological problems, but also present distinct solutions to these
perceived challenges. In "Inventing the Internet," Janet Abbate suggests that the "TCP/IP
protocols, gateways, and uniform address scheme were designed to create a coherent
system while making minimal demands on the participating networks" (1999, 219). These
"minimal demands" gave the Internet, as a locally successful technological system, the
flexibility to survive commercial and political pressures as the system expanded among new
users and into new geographic areas. Yet Abbate also suggests that the very success of the
TCP/IP protocols refutes the general assumption that technical standards are socially
neutral, establishing that "standards can be politics by other means" (1999, 179).12 In
particular, computer networks and inter-networks were designed according to various
technical specifications that revealed distinct operational logics. The Internet's core
networking protocols reflected the values of the social groups that emerged from Cold War
military research culture, an environment that fostered practices that were not only highly
collaborative but also interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial in spirit.

These values continue to infuse the Internet today. In fact, that networked
computing in the early 1990s often did not operate "as advertised" is an irony that reveals
the deeply social nature of protocols. 13 Only as networked computing became tied up with
utopian visions of empowered individualism and a meritocratic marketplace, did it become
technically possible to redeem its promises. Abbate's analysis of this process largely focuses
on technical objects, yet she might also have usefully examined the more purely social and

12 Abbate's work is a definitive account of the history of network protocols through individual
developers, U.S. Department of Defense mandates, and international standards conflicts.
13 For a sense of the "state" of the Internet in the early 1990s, see the Computer Chronicles episode
on "The Internet." Computer Chronicles was hosted by Steve Cheifet and produced in San Mateo,
California by KCSM-TV. 1134.
20


even "commercial" aspects of achieving wider agreement on standards. These aspects
include, as we shall see, encounters at trade shows and exhibitions.
Paul Edwards contends that constructing and maintaining standards is a complex
process interwoven with social practices:
Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no
matter where, what, or who applies them... Most standards also involve
discipline on the part of human participants, who are notoriously apt to
misunderstand and resist. As a result, maintaining adherence to a standard
involves ongoing adjustments to people, practices, and machines. (2004, 827-

828)
Thus, even the process of getting the core structures of the Internet to "work" elicited the
"ongoing adjustments" needed to create a coherent, effective research network. Trevor
Pinch and Wiebe Bijker point out that the social environment shapes the technical
characteristics of technologies, and emphasize the critical role that social groups play in

defining and addressing problems during a technology's development. A technology can be
considered stabilized once consensus emerges and "the social groups involved in designing
and using technology decide that a problem is solved" (Pinch and Bijker 1987, 12). Since a
technology is not a fixed object per se but rather emerges amidst interactions with
numerous social groups, this process of "closure and stabilization" occurs numerous times
(and even continuously) as a technology is developed, expanded, and improved (Pinch and
Bijker 1987, 17-50). This characteristic suggests that although technological change may
appear to follow a linear path (even if appearing as a disruptive force), the process is in fact
more nuanced. The tools of standardization, namely the technologies, organizational
solutions, and/or inter-connection protocols, also function as "gateways" that make it
possible to transfer technical as well as social, and cultural practices across otherwise
incompatible domains:
Standardization in its various guises (formal and informal, top-down and
bottom-up) is perhaps the leading example of a gateway technology on the
social/organizational side ... It is at this point of heterogeneous connection
among systems that the eventual power, scope, and world-building quality of
infrastructure begins to take shape. (Jackson et al. 2007)
This quality recalls another aspect of standardization: the degree to which it favors the
politics and practices of a specific group of actors to the exclusion of another. In other
words, a technology has certain attributes because inventors design a technology to express
their personal visions and desires. Understanding what is required to standardize a

21


technology becomes a critical part of tracing the technical, organizational, and political
negotiations and adaptations that were necessary for the Internet to become more widely
successful. Many of the same qualities likely helped the Internet as it scaled beyond a
locally constructed system and expanded into other domains, linking with other networks to
emerge as a commercially

managed global information infrastructure.

Deploying

technologies required the mobilization of network engineers and technologists, such as
those affiliated with Interop, who shared a vision and collaborative methods of making
meaning.
In the standardization and expansion of communications networks, technologies
have physical qualities that are central to how they operate locally or as part of larger
infrastructures. Modern infrastructures are technical systems-say, transportation,
telecommunications, or energy-that rationally engineer the world and order it in a way
that facilitates the circulation of goods and ideas. They are also conceptual, cultural devices
that are powerful as a mode of regulating societies by "publicly performing the relations
between the individual and the state" (Larkin 2009, 245) while at the same forging
architectures of the sublime that join the technological with our imaginations and notions
of progress. The infrastructure of computer networks appears to function in another
manner altogether, in a kind of chaos, an unpredictable structure without a center.
Although the distributed and flattened organizational structures of computer networks
appear to resist control, they are in fact governed by a particular logic that functions as a
form of management. These mechanisms, which are deeply imbedded in the free market,
deregulation, and enterprise, drive partnerships with the promise of "openness" and
"connectivity" that occurs through the global integration of the networked information
technologies.
To begin to explore the complex questions around technological change and the
particular visions that drove the physical construction of the Internet, it is worthwhile to
set the stage by visiting one part of a vast realm that is "commercially viable" while being
wholly a product of an alternative utopia "embodied" in the animated image of a talking
mouse. Under his patronage, we are offered a view of a high-tech utopia dominated by
benign corporate sponsorship and the guarantee of technological progress.

22


Spaceship Earth
Walt Disney's Spaceship Earth exhibit, located in Orlando, Florida's Epcot theme park,
presents an "Animatronic" tour of the history and future of communications. The Disney
exhibit exists as a series of dioramas - a cinematic recycling of the past cast as iconic
moments of technological achievements - strung together as a narrative of progress that
draws visitors into a future that is already upon them. Spaceship Earth and enterprise
computer-networking trade shows share little with one another in terms of operational
logics and visions, yet by way of this ambivalently defined relationship between
computational technologies, corporate interests, and individual agency, the two operate in
critical tension with one another. Each powerfully evokes the idealism and attention toward
social and moral progress that has infused technological innovations in the U.S. since at
least the

1 9 th

century (Marx 1964).

The term "mobilizing utopias" will be used here to refer to the implementation of
idealistic models into experimental projects or prototypes, and even the practicalities of
bringing a technology to scale. Epcot realized Walt Disney's vision of an "Experimental
Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT), a near-future world inspired by a faith in
the ability of cybernetic information systems and corporations to solve social ills and
advance society more effectively than individuals and democracies. The iconic Spaceship
Earth sphere figuratively anchors the park. It was also Epcot's guiding metaphor, 14 a vision
equally inspired by popular science fiction and the cybernetic information systems of the
military-industrial research world. Promotional material created for the park's launch in

1982 consisted of an illustration of a half-shrouded geodesic "planet" encircled by what
appeared to be a monorail track or the contrails of a rocket. The image's intention is clear:
it presents a "usable future" that has moved beyond the polarizing Cold War and
traditional economics of scarcity to reveal the planet as a globally integrated system
connecting all living things to a future of ever more efficient technologies (Deese 2009, 1-2;
Turner 2006, 56-58) (see Figure 1). The layout of the park itself is divided between "Future
World" and "World Showcase" pavilions, presenting spectacular displays of technological
innovations and cultural identities. In a style that first became popular with the 1939 New

"Spaceship Earth" is most often associated with inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, who published
OperatingManual for Spaceship Earth in 1969; see also 1996 works by Barbara Ward and Kenneth
Boulding. Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury wrote the original narrative for the Spaceship Earth
exhibit.
14


York World's Fair's "World of Tomorrow," Disney's simulated landscapes market the idea of
progress itself, brought by corporations whose "expertise would create a harmonious world"
(Nye 1994, 213). Corporate sponsors support each exhibit, entertaining visitors with
glimpses of technology-infused prototypes of future worlds packaged for middlebrow tastes
(Bukatman 1991, 56; Nye 1994, 199-224).

Figure 1: Advertisement for the October 1, 1982 launch of EPCOT theme park. A Buckminster
Fuller-inspired Spaceship Earth dominates this illustration, underscoring the cybernetic influence
on Walt Disney's futuristic visions of the ideal society.
"Mobilizing utopias" as a concept also implies the complex and often contradictory
processes of transforming emergent technologies into everyday tools that support and even
shape modern lives. The Spaceship Earth exhibit, like the Interop network, (re)negotiates
the transition between the first stage of exploration, a period of innovation and glory, and
the next, when emerging technologies become familiar, practical, and even invisible. The

24