At the four host sites, the teams had even less time to build their parts of the network. And some of the team members had no experience of this kind of work. Vint Cerf was one of them. Every day he thought, 'When are the professional managers going to arrive? We're just graduate students.' But there never were any professional managers. So Cerf and his friends just continued to do the work. At each host site, the computer was a mainframe - a machine that was designed to behave like the only computer in the universe. In each case, this computer had to be connected to another computer - an IMP - for the first time. But each mainframe was different and needed a different set of connections. 'The question is, exactly how do they connect?' said Frank Heart. 'How do they connect electrically? How do they connect logically? How does the software connect? These are very difficult questions. And they have to be solved very, very, very quickly. Because we at BBN have to build special hardware into the Honeywell machine at our end of the connection, and all the host sites have to build special hardware for their mainframe computers and write special software to match our connection.' ARPA was very clear about the network it wanted: one host computer connected to one IMP. But the host sites all had more than one big computer. Soon they were calling Frank Heart. 'Wait, wait!' they said. We've got more than one computer! We want to connect two or three computers to your IMP please!' Heart was surprised. ' W h y are you suddenly so keen on the network?' he asked. 'Only a few months ago, you were all saying "Leave us alone."' Well, yes, that's true,' said the people at the host sites. 'But now we can see how useful the network will be.' 'To share data with other sites?' 'Not really ...' 'What, then?' Frank Heart wanted to know. 'Well, even here, just at this university, the computers can't talk to each other,' said the host sites. 'They're all made by different companies and they all use different software. But your IMP is designed to connect different machines together. If you let us connect all our computers to the IMP, then we'll be able to share data here much more easily.' 'So, you want me to build you a local network?' 'Yes, please.' •
On 16 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. But at BBN there was not much time to watch the historic television broadcast. It was just six weeks before the first IMP was due to be delivered to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). BBN heard that UCLA was not ready. UCLA believed that BBN was going to be late. Both teams were working twenty-four hours a day. At BBN, Frank Heart was worried about transporting the IMP from Cambridge to Los Angeles. This was not simple in 1969, says Severe Ornstein:'The ability to move a machine across the country was important. Today you carry machines around and you expect to switch them on and you just expect it all to work. But just a few years ago, computers were built into walls. And if you shook the room a little bit, it was days before you could make the machine work again.' Frank Heart decided that the IMP should go to Los Angeles by air. Truett Thatch met it at Los Angeles airport and he was shocked to see that the box was the wrong way up: 'Somewhere along the way, the IMP had been turned over an odd number of times.' He made sure it was turned over again and went with it to the UCLA.
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