Since it's so fashionable these days to question whether government can do anything right -- whether it's regulating banks, bolstering the economy or overseeing healthcare -- it's worth noting that we're about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the most important federal initiatives of our time.
The event was the launch of the Internet, which we date from Oct. 29, 1969, when a refrigerator-sized special-purpose computer in Leonard Kleinrock's engineering lab at UCLA transmitted its first message to a twin machine in Menlo Park, Calif. (The message was the first two letters of the command "Login.")
That was the first exchange over what was then known as the ARPAnet, which evolved, after many intermediate steps, into what we know today as the Internet.
The ARPAnet had been hatched many years earlier in the mind of a Pentagon research official named Robert W. Taylor. We should begin the story with him, because his role reminds us that sometimes private enterprise isn't always up to the task of advancing technological progress, and sometimes even gets in the way. Then it's crucial for the government to step in.
Taylor, now 77, isn't known to the public. But his name is a byword in computer science and networking, where he's regarded as one of the most important figures in the field's history.
That's not only because of his role in creating the Internet but because of what he did after leaving the Pentagon: He moved to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the legendary PARC, where he oversaw the engineering team responsible for such inventions as the personal computer, Ethernet (a local networking system, for you non-geeks out there), and the visual computer display.
I first met Taylor 10 years ago, when he became the central figure in a book I was writing about PARC. He was outspoken, uncompromising and visionary then, and he still is, as he showed an audience honoring him last week at the University of Texas, his alma mater.
As the chief of the information technology office at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1966, Taylor demanded that the computer research projects he was funding around the country learn to talk to one another.
