Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock, now at the University of California at Los Angeles, created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology underpinning the internet, while a graduate student at MIT.

Kleinrock's host computer became the first node of the internet in September 1969. He directed the first message that was sent between computers on the internet in October 1969. He was listed by the Los Angeles Times in 1999 as among the "50 People Who Most Influenced Business This Century".

Excerpts from an interview by the CBC's Rick Boguski with Len Kleinrock, of UCLA:

Did you realize back then just how important your invention was?

The answer is yes and no. And the yes part is actually documented in a press release that came out months before we sent that first message between the two computers. In that press release, I'm quoted as saying, "this network eventually will be everywhere, always available, always on, anybody with any device will be able to get access to the network from any location at any time and it will be invisible just like electricity." And, in fact, part of that vision has come about. But the part that I missed is that my 97-year-old mother will be on the internet today and she is.

What I missed was that this is a technology that would allow people to communicate and groups to form. It was not about computers communicating. And I only realized that when in 1972 we put e-mail on the internet and that took over the traffic. That's when I saw, yes, this was a people thing, not a machine thing.

Some now fear government and politics will get in the way of internet growth.

What made the internet as powerful as what it is, was on the one hand, while government funded the network, they kept hands off. They had excellent technology management but in terms of administrative management and overbearing overhead and oversight, they stepped back and they left the people they had trusted, we researchers, to develop the network. As we move into the modern era, there is an attempt to do overregulation and overbearing control and I think that's a mistake. I think the role for government these days, is to provide a forum by which the stakeholders can discuss issues and resolve disputes, but not to impose regulations except where it makes sense…In most cases, government should stay away, fund, provide a forum and let the marketplace and the innovators do their thing.

What do you foresee in the next 35 years?

Anyone who tries to predict five years out is a fool. So let me try. I see there are three technology developments that are going to happen and are happening right now. If you remember, I said one of the features of the vision I had was that anyone with any device could get on the network at any time from any location. That's not yet the case. It's rather difficult to move to another environment and still get the same set of services you have at your home location… Nomadic computing is a field that is beginning to emerge and access in hotspots is helping that considerably. So nomadic computing is one technology, a leg on this three-legged footstool that I am talking about.

The second one is, most people believe cyberspace is behind the screen on their computers. What's necessary is that we take it out of that screen and into the physical world, their familiar environment, in the desk, in the walls, on the floor, in your shoes, in your eyeglasses, on your belt and in your automobile. So when you walk into a room the room knows that you walked in and it knows your profile, what your privileges and your preferences are, and it provides you with what you need. You may come into the room and ask, tell me about Canadian television, and a hologram will come up or a speech response or a display will pop up. It will know exactly what you need and respond to your environment. So the idea of taking things out of the screen and embedding it, using embedded technology, actually senses logic, memory, processing, displays, communications in our environment is the second leg on that stool.

The third leg is ubiquity. Everywhere you go you should be able to have this nomadic access and these smart spaces, this intelligent environment I'm talking about. And once we have those three, we will then have a global nervous system that's only infrastructure. I'm not talking about the applications that will come along or the services. Those are the hard things to predict. Those are the ones that surprise us all of the time. The web was a surprise, e-mail was a surprise, instant messaging was a surprise, voice over IP [internet protocol] was a surprise, so predicting those applications is the hard part. But one thing I can be sure of, once we lay out this global infrastructure I'm talking about, we're going to have a vast, vast network moving an enormous amount of information around at very fast speeds with lots and lots of processing, humans can't interact with that effectively.

So we will see a deployment of what we call intelligent agents, software agents that will be out there to serve you, that are mining the data, that point out things to you, alert you to certain things that they know you need to know about. So the rise of these intelligent agents taking control of some of the mundane things and doing the hard part for you will also rise.

Will I have to worry about my privacy even more than I may be worried now?

You bet. You can kiss your privacy goodbye. It's gone. You've given it up already. If you carry a cellphone or charge something on a credit card, people know where you are and pretty much what you are doing. Privacy has been given up a long time ago, even before the internet.

The internet, in fact, has exacerbated that problem. I think the best way for you to find privacy today is to go to the edge of the ocean, strip down and dive in and hope there is no sonar down there watching you. All of our ID tags will know what you buy and where you put them.

I think it's a lost cause right now. You can't put that genie back in the box. Just like you can't put spam back in the box. It's out there and you have to learn to live with it.

Do you have any concerns about the future?

For one thing, I hope people don't retreat from the internet because it has this dark side emerging, the spam, the pedophilia, the pornography, the loss of privacy, identity theft and all the rest.

There are mechanisms being developed right now to try to deal with those problem, authenticate the e-mail you get, putting in charging mechanisms for people who put out too much e-mail, have trusted sensors to where some of the communication goes.

So the advice is, hang in there. It's not very good right now with all of the spam, viruses and worms, but the important thing is to find ways to use this technology to enhance the things you do.

Already we know the effects on education, the way we work, the way we play, when we look at entertainment. These things will increase. And I think it's the most magnificent distribution mechanism I've ever seen. And the thing that gives it this power is that it allows many people to interact in an open culture, open research, shared applications, shared ideas. That culture and basically that community of people, that combination is what gives it its power and that's what we have to preserve at the very high level as we move ahead into the future.

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