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Researchers used modem-equipped portable computers like these when the Internet, as a new invention called ARPAnet, was being developed at ISI and other centers.
focused on information processing for U.S. military and civil applications. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Defense’s research and development organization (today known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) had been supporting his work in packet switching for computer communication networks and wanted him to expand both its scope and level of effort–at RAND, if possible, or, if not, at an academic institution where the research would
The Internet Guru… Dr. Robert Kahn, a pioneer in computer communications who is widely acknowledged as the “builder of the ARPAnet” and an Internet pioneer, had this to say about ISI: “Since its inception, ISI personnel provided key support for the Internet, which enabled it to grow from a research tool to a major national and international system.” be immersed in a stimulating intellectual environment. And time was critical. RAND management at that time was cool to the proposal and so Uncapher, assured by ARPA that it would support his research wherever he located it, approached UCLA.
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But the university told Uncapher it would take at least 15 months to create an organizational structure for the work. “I don’t have three weeks,” Uncapher replied. A mutual friend put Uncapher and Kaprielian in touch. The two met on several successive evenings one week in 1972 to discuss the idea and by that Friday night, had reached an agreement to establish ISI at USC. “The whole thing,” Uncapher recalled, “got done in one week.” Within 30 days of the UncapherKaprielian handshake, the institute began with Uncapher, a staff of four other former RAND engineers, and an umbrella grant of approximately $4 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was located in Marina del Rey, instead of University Park, because of its proximity to Los Angeles International Airport–a requirement Uncapher insisted on for the convenience of his frequent Washington, D.C. visitors. Some exceptional research soon followed. Along with several other institutions, the Institute was one of the founders of the Internet, and staffers such as the late Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris, now board chairman of Nominum, Inc., created much of the network's domain system–the familiar .com, .org, .edu, that are the provinces of email and web site addresses. These gifted researchers also played significant roles in the development of the Transmission Control and Internet protocols (TCP/IP) that initially linked various Defense Department computer networks and were so successful precisely because they satisfied a few basic, widely needed services (file transfer, electronic mail, remote log on), across a very large number of client and server systems. Uncapher steered the Institute into early work in artificial intelligence and also developed a unique resource for the computer community: the MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service) prototyping service, a cooperative arrangement that allows computer chip designers to share costs and economically produce advanced copies of their ideas. Originally conceived by Xerox, but developed by ISI, this service prototyped such famous creations as Sun Microsystems’s Scalable
Processor ARChitecture (SPARC) chip, and designs that became the heart of the Million Instructions Per Section (MIPS™) system used by Silicon Graphics. ISI continues to be a major resource for research in the engineering community, as well as the academic community, thanks to a special program that allows students free chip prototyping.
A team of hardware and software experts designed this new chip to break through a processing speed barrier imposed by delays when retrieving information from memory. The first examples are now being tested.
Schorr, a native New Yorker whose accent is pure Bronx, became the Institute’s director in 1988 when Uncapher left. While interested in a wide range of art, literature and music, he decided early on, after a 1950s summer job in the then-nascent field of computers, that computers and information technology would be his life’s work. He graduated from the City College of New York, and in 1963, earned his PhD from Princeton. His PhD thesis expanded on the pioneering work in digital transfer registers by Irving Reed, a noted mathematician and inventor who later joined the USC Engineering faculty. Reed received the Millennium Medal last year from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a Distinguished Emeriti Award from the university in 1999. Schorr expanded Reed's work into a new and more powerful basis for key computer functions, ideas that he developed when after a year as a professor at continued on page 22